Denise Filiatrault | fire actress

Denise Filiatrault belongs to a rare category of artists, the one I call “fire actresses”. When you see them play, you never know if they embrace the roles assigned to them on their own or if the directors make the wise choice to offer them characters who have “dogs”.

This question, I asked myself once again while watching the documentary Denise Filiatrault – Journey of a legendwhich is presented this Friday evening on TVA.

This famous fire that I evoke, Denise Filiatrault put it in the rage of Hélène (Once Upon a Time in the East), in the steely character of Blanche Bellefeuille (The death of a lumberjack) or in the grudges of Lola Lee (Tomorrow morning, Montreal is waiting for me).

This fire, she will also put it in many other characters who have crossed her long career: Rose Ouimet and Pierrette Guérin (The sisters-in-law), Roberta (The pink flight of the flamingo), Gertrude Blum (The Seahorse) or Delima (The beautiful stories of the pays d’en haut).

Denise Filiatrault has often recounted her career as a pioneer and relentless worker in a host of interviews. But this documentary, directed by her daughter Danièle Lorain and produced by Denise Robert, shows us an essential aspect of her career: the prodigious desire she had to do this job. When she talks about this little girl she sees performing in a church basement, we understand that from there, she will want to do everything possible to do like her.

When she took her first steps in the theater, when she was in 8^and year, young Denise keeps her makeup on the next morning to go to school. “I wanted to show that I was doing theatre! Poor little girl, what did you want? she says, describing herself.

But paradoxically, the one who went out of her way to make a name for herself tells us that she stopped playing because she had become lazy, somewhat jaded. Learning texts had become hard work for her. This is what will make her turn to directing in the theater and directing in the cinema.

Do not expect to find around Denise Filiatrault a crowd of collaborators and playmates. Only two people appear in this documentary, Michel Tremblay, with whom there is a lot of talk about the creation of sisters-in-lawand Denys Arcand, with whom she did not work, except for a 25-second scene in the film Gina. You should know that the stage woman and the filmmaker are great friends.

On the other hand, we are entitled to several extracts from the archives where we see the music-hall aspect of his career and the extreme richness of his career. God she makes things! The finale of the show offers us a montage of images quite eloquent in this regard.

To tell about her childhood and her beginnings, we had the idea of ​​taking Denise Filiatrault to the places where she grew up. In front of the house where she was born, rue Cartier, between Saint-Joseph and Gilford, she points to apartments and names without hesitation the names of her former neighbours.

In front of the local grocery store (still present), she remembers how she harassed the owner on Wednesday morning to find out if the Radiomondea weekly where we talked about the big stars of the hour, had arrived.

Then, facing the former Pheasant Doré, corner Saint-Laurent and Sainte-Catherine, she says that she was hired to revive the cabaret, but that she was “sacred outside” because she “n’t was not good”.

It was in this cabaret that she met Jacques Lorain, who would become her husband and the father of her two daughters. “My national theater school, my conservatory, it was he who gave them to me. »

It is obviously a question of the difficult evenings at Casa Loma where she performed with Dominique Michel. Of this artist, whom the public forever associates with Denise Filiatraut, it is obviously a question of Me and the other. We learn that the “great race of demons” still watches episodes of this comedy that marked the history of television and that it always makes them laugh. “Dominique is the girl who made me laugh the most in my life,” she says.

Denise Filiatrault finds that young people today are very lucky to have theater schools. But when Tremblay asks her if she would have liked to study this art, she answers yes, before adding that the great impatient she has always been is not sure that she would have made it after the three or four years of training.

About this mythical impatience so often depicted by the actors she has directed, she is content to say: “When they were working, I was patient. But when I felt they hadn’t worked, I would go crazy. »

At the end of the documentary, Denise Filiatrault says this stunning thing: “I was not a great actress. But you only have to look back at the great performances that television and television leave us to understand that this is completely false.

How then to explain the creation, during his lifetime, of the Denise-Filiatrault prize, which will be awarded to a person for his remarkable contribution to the field of the performing arts, whether in terms of composition, creation, artistic direction, production, scenography, staging or stage technique?

The versatile nature of this prize delights “la Filiatrault”. Because with her legendary energy, she embraced this profession from every angle, every setback.

The fire is there, too.

Denise Filiatrault – Journey of a legend. April 22, TVA, 9 p.m.