He was a splendid man.
I may be heterosexual (note to young people: this word which is falling into oblivion refers to men who are attracted to women, there were many of them in the 70s), every time I met him in a first, I was blown away by his bearing, his elegance, his assurance, his charm.
Name me a Quebecer who never dreamed of looking like Michel Côté, and I’ll show you a liar.
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A BIG
Although he had everything going for him (beauty, talent, the love of the public and a family he adored), he never looked down on you.
As Josélito Michaud wrote on his Facebook page yesterday, Michel Côté was proud without being vain.
It is not because one is tall (and that one was born in Alma, the center of the world) that one must make others feel that they are small, on the contrary.
And just because you can play a homophobic dad in a critically acclaimed arthouse movie doesn’t mean you can’t put on fake teeth and cheap wigs to play crooked-eyed Tarlas in a tagada-tsouin-tsouin stuffing.
There is no public fool.
On this point, Michel Côté was like Michel Serreault: as comfortable in a psychological drama as in a boulevard play, as much in the shoes of Pierre Gauthier, the virile investigator ofOmertathan in that of Pointu, Serge or Jean-Lou.
(By the way, speaking of Jean-Lou, the effeminate gay man who would make Christian Lalancette look like Mad Dog Vachon: I was watching TV yesterday and I saw excerpts from La petite vie broadcast without any warning!
Are you crazy? Have you thought about the psychological health of our children? Quick, a complaint to the CRTC! It had to run in the corridors of Radio-Canada…)
THE POLITES OF KINGS
I saw brew thrice.
A few days after its creation, at the tiny Théâtre des Voyagements, in March 1979, then a few years later in front of a large crowd.
Michel Côté must have played Broue more often than Daniel Pinard uttered the words “Espelette peppers”.
Yet he was never on autopilot.
Oh, he might be thinking about his grocery list, but it didn’t show. He had too much public respect to spare himself.
“Accuracy is the politeness of kings,” the saying goes.
Also generosity.
The disadvantage of aging is that we see our idols disappear one after the other.
Unfortunately, in Quebec, we have so little memory that we have to write “I remember” on our license plates to remember to remember.
Like a filmmaker suffering from Alzheimer’s who writes his name in his coat sleeve.
It’s up to us to keep the flame burning.
It’s all well and good, razing heritage houses to build pharmacies, pop boxes or corrugated iron strip bars, but that doesn’t make for a strong culture.
I had the chance to see Michel Côté in person.
And I hope that our grandchildren will have the chance to see it on the screens that they will put in the cornea.
It was, quite simply,
a splendid man.