Céline Bonnier

Born on 31st August 1965 in Lévis, a suburb to the south of Quebec City, Céline Bonnier was the youngest of eight children, six boys and two girls. The family was brought up in an exceptionally liberal, cultured environment by mother Raymonde and father Irénée, a public sector administrator and serving politician in the mid-1970s. Encouraged by her parents to develop her imaginative side, she was entertaining the neighbors to impromptu routines in the local playground from the age of seven, which is how she discovered the 'high' that persuaded her to become an actor. Music featured largely in family life; she studied it at high school in Sainte-Foy, and can play several instruments, including the transverse flute and the accordion. She and some of her brothers had a flair for art, and she still sketches as a form of self-expression and particularly appreciates the work of the great painters. But her talent for acting led her high school drama teacher to recommend that she audition for the Conservatoire de théâtre in Quebec. Graduating in 1987, she joined Jacques Lessard's Théâtre Repère, where she met Robert Lepage who invited her to play the part of Konstanz in his 1991 production of Les Plaques tectoniques in both Montreal and the UK. She settled in Montreal, joining the theatre group Momentum under artistic director Jean-Frédéric Messier, with whom she has worked steadily to the present day, lately graduating to her own productions (Cholestérol gratuit, La Fête des morts). This theatrical output is interspersed with work at home and abroad for renowned stage directors such as Denis Marleau and Brigitte Haentjens. Meanwhile her film career, commencing with a screen version of Plaques tectoniques, Les, comprises a dozen films ranging in style from art-house to popular, under directors such as Louis Saïa, Charles Binamé, Éric Canuel and Marc-André Forcier. In contrast to many of her peers, her TV career is not saturated with long-running series and soaps, as she is critical of a lot of TV output, but her recent choices of TV drama (Tag, Le dernier chapitre) have earned her several awards. She has the ability to tackle difficult and uncompromising roles and remains determinedly indifferent to the star system, frequently changing her appearance for them. Céline Bonnier has worked with Roy Dupuis as an actor on several projects, from Million Dollar Babies (1994) to, more recently, Séraphin: un homme et son péché (2002), Le dernier chapitre (2002), Monica la mitraille (2004), and Les états-Unis d'Albert (2005).