With his gaunt, angular features and piercing gaze, this charismatic French-Canadian leading actor won considerable acclaim onstage in the early and mid-1980s and began starring in well-received art-house films near the end of the decade. An award-winning actor for his work in French-speaking theater in Montreal, Lothaire Bluteau enjoyed a major breakthrough with his role as the theater director obsessed with a modernized staging of the Passion and his performance as Jesus in Denys Arcand's striking satirical drama, "Jesus of Montreal" (1989).

Bluteau later made an acclaimed debut upon the