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Blouin, Paul

Quebec actor and director, born in 1925 in Dauphin, Manitoba, and educated in Saskatchewan; died in Montreal February 3, 1996.

Paul Blouin arrived in Montreal at the beginning of the 1940s and studied voice voice and drama in Valleyfield. He soon integrated himself into the Montreal anglophone theatre milieu and acted with the Montreal Repertory Theatre and the Negro Theatre Guild. His understanding of the English and American theatre scene - for instance the works of Tennessee Williams and Harold Pinter - was to mark his directing work in Quebec in French and have a significant effect on the creation of a Quebec theatrical style and literature.

Soon Blouin moved from theatre to television and brought many of Canada's great playwrights to . From 1959 to 1986, he directed fifty-seven plays, twenty-seven written by Quebec playwrights, including Gratien Gelinas, Marcel Dubé (Bilan), Françoise Loranger, and Michel Tremblay (En pièces détachées). He occasionally returned to the theatre directing Le Cid for the Nouvelle Compagnie Théâtrale / Théâtre Denise-Pelletier and several other works. His career ended due to the emphysema which plagued him.

Said actor Monique Miller on the director's death, "The flame within him was contagious, nearly magic. I remember [one of his teams] for a broadcast worked 26 hours straight between a Sunday and a Monday morning simply to get the work done."

Viewings: Mort d'un commis voyageur, La, Radio-Canada, 1962, a production of the Miller play staged for television by M. Blouin and featuring Jean Duceppe in one of his greatest performances.

Profile by Gaetan Charlebois

Last updated 2020-05-07