Daniel Lavoie: the official website

Daniel Lavoie makes a fresh start

Le Soleil, 2nd May 2000
by Gilles Carignan

A Manitoban of French extraction, playing a Rumanian immigrant, in a British-Canadian joint production, filmed in English, in Montréal! For his second shot at film acting, Daniel Lavoie could not have imagined anything more complicated.

Since the meeting with the singer to discuss The Book of Eve – in cinemas now – took place in Paris, this only added to the geographical oddities of this matter.

Sitting in the lounge of a big hotel, on an evening when there was no performance of Le Petit Prince (he has since left the musical), Daniel Lavoie emphasised, without batting an eyelid, that he had never dreamt of making a film. "Before starting this film I hadn't liked it, I hadn't wanted to do it", he said. "Making a film takes lots of time, you have to stop everything else", he explained. "I'd never had an offer which justified taking two, three or four months off to make a film. I admit I prefer making music to making films, except, perhaps this time."

Daniel Lavoie had already had a taste of the Seventh Art (film) in 1991 in Le Fabuleux Voyage de L'Ange. "I'd never had the opportunity to act and try something else. And this is what I found strangely amusing in The Book of Eve. I'd even like to do it again. The Book of Eve, directed by Claude Fournier, is adapted from the novel by Constance Beresford-Howe. It tells the story of a woman (Claire Bloom) who, on her 65th birthday, decides to walk out on 40 years of marriage and her luxury house in Westmount, to make a new life for herself. She sets up home in a rooming house which certainly hasn't been awarded four stars. There she meets up with Johnny, a Rumanian immigrant, a real charmer who's rather fond of the bottle and is a big fan of Tom Jones. This is the character whom Daniel Lavoie plays. His participation in both the rock opera Sand et les Romantiques, in which he played Delacroix, and in Notre Dame de Paris, had enabled him to gain some confidence in performing different roles. Besides, it was his performance in the musical Notre Dame de Paris that attracted the attention of the director Claude Fournier. He was desperately looking for someone to play Johnny. He made his find on seeing Lavoie on stage in Paris. "I like his style, a bit outmoded, quaint", the film maker explained. "I like his natural romanticism which barely exists these days. It's no longer fashionable. He's got charm but it's not the false charm of a Don Juan. He is something more vulnerable, a bit awkward but, as well as that, he's got a sort of elegance, a dignity, a rarely found stature."

Daniel Lavoie gave Claude Fournier a big fright. Barely two weeks before the start of filming in Autumn 2001 he phoned the film maker to back out of it. "I felt intimidated", he admitted. "Firstly, I had to act in English and play someone with a Rumanian accent and secondly, I was acting with a very great actress, Claire Bloom (she's filmed with Charlie Chaplin as well as for Woody Allen) and I didn't feel I was up to it." On finding this message on his answering machine, Claude Fournier was thunderstruck. "Daniel Lavoie is Mr Worryguts personified", he said laughing. He went round to Daniel's house the next day and he tried to think of another actor for the part. But he didn't find a solution to his problem. "I'd had Daniel in mind right from the start. I had no choice but to try to convince him." And he did it. "Claire Bloom gave me invaluable advice on the set," Daniel Lavoie stressed. "Everyday she encouraged me and, so long as she didn't arrive in the mornings in a bad mood, I told myself that I couldn't have been as bad as all that. So I weathered the storm", he said laughingly. The singer didn't know the actress and she didn't know him. “We had to see if we could play these rather odd lovers" he noted.

Theoretically, Daniel Lavoie found it "charming to see in this world where it is always the old fellows who get the young girls, that this time it is the older woman who gets the younger man. I found that a great idea and rather intriguing. Apart from …."

This "apart from" was one of his little qualms about the love scenes with his partner, although these were really very tame. "I'm awfully shy and a bit self-conscious", he confided. "Even if there is nothing really explicit, for me it was explicit. Claire was so professional that we managed it."

Not without difficulty though. The director pulled their legs once the film was in the can. "Well, I certainly didn't make a porn film with you two!"

That's very true, but Claude Fournier is going to meet up with Daniel Lavoie again on the set of the TV series which he is getting ready, it's a joint Canadian-French production in which Daniel Lavoie will play the part of Félix Leclerc.

“Mind you,” Daniel Lavoie points out, “it’s not going to be like André Philippe’s interpretation of Félix Leclerc. It won’t be an imitation, more a reminder, a representation.”