Filmmaker, producer and writer Claude Fournier died Thursday, at the age of 91, following heart problems. His brother Guy Fournier made the announcement in the Journal.
The filmmaker spent the last days at the University of Montreal Hospital Center after suffering a heart attack during a trip to Martinique.
“We have spent our life together. We shared everything,” said Guy Fournier.
A prolific filmmaker, Claude Fournier leaves behind him an abundant body of work.
In May 1970, his first fiction feature film, the erotic comedy two golden women, quickly became a popular phenomenon (we are talking about two million spectators). The director will then try to reconnect with this success by directing Puss in Bootsin 1971, and The apple, the tail and the pipsin 1974.
From the 1980s, he multiplied the important productions: Second-Hand Happiness (1983), The Weavers of Power (1988) and Juliette Pomerleau (1999) are among his greatest hits.
In 2008, Claude Fournier and his spouse Marie-José Raymond took care of setting up the project to digitize and restore Quebec’s cinematographic heritage, Elephant – memory of Quebec cinema. Fournier and Raymond hold these positions until the end of 2018, supervising the restoration of 225 feature films.
In November 2005, Claude Fournier was elected municipal councilor for Saint-Paul-d’Abbotsford, in the MRC de Rouville, in Montérégie. He won this election by 125 votes against 42 for his opponent.
At the same time, the filmmaker found himself at the heart of a controversy after the broadcast of his series Felix Leclerc.
The programming director of Radio-Canada, Mario Clément, then declared that the series was one of the worst he had seen on television; statements that will lead him to court. In 2008, the Superior Court of Quebec finally ruled in favor of the Fournier-Raymond couple and condemned the SRC to pay $200,000 to the plaintiffs who were claiming $4.3 million for defamation.