After more than 25 years away from the boards, Francine Ruel is making a return to the theater this summer. She is featured in À la folie!, presented in Cowansville, alongside Geneviève Brouillette, Marilou Morin and Guy Richer. Encounter.
Francine Ruel thrives on challenges. Writing (novels and screenplays), teaching, television, cinema, improvisation and animation, she has done everything since leaving the Conservatoire de Québec in 1969. her again!”. But I’m lucky to have three jobs: acting, writing, and teaching. When I finished a series, I retired to the countryside to start a novel. »
If there is a red thread in his life and his career, it is the quest for happiness. The word appears in a third of the titles of his books. And the character she defends at the theater this summer, in À la folie!, owns an old cabaret of songs called… Le petit bonheur. Francine Ruel hesitated a few days before diving into the adventure, because she is returning to the boards 28 years after Le Sea Horse, at Duceppe, alongside Gilles Renaud. However, roles are becoming rare for actresses over time, she laments, quoting actress Simone Signoret: “On the small and big screen, men mature and women age. »
It is also an old, sick and gruff woman that she embodies in the dramatic comedy by Guy Richer and Claude Montminy. “Simone is sick and she is 10 years older than my age (75). I have to learn to slow down my movements, to tame the walker, to visualize the loss of autonomy… It’s a big challenge. »
But Francine Ruel is not the type to slip away at the first obstacle.
The piece is based on “an idea that’s both simple and great,” she says. Charles (Guy Richer), entertainer and notorious party animal, is one day forced to take care of his 85-year-old mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease. Despite his mother’s attachment to Le Petit Bonheur, he wants to sell the cabaret and place her in a CHSLD. To better make him accept his fate, the son will imitate singers and perform songs by Joe Dassin, Julien Clerc, Cat Stevens, Tom Jones…
“I love dramatic comedy,” she said. The authors and the director Marcel Pomerlo play on the fine line between laughter and tears. While being very respectful in their approach to illness and old age. »
Francine Ruel is very willing and not afraid to dive, to open her game. “I learned that by playing the first LNI games with Robert Gravel,” she said. One day when I couldn’t play my character in rehearsal, the director René Richard Cyr gave me a hint that I have never forgotten. He asked me if I was hot while playing… Because you have to sweat, otherwise it means you are playing with your head, intellectually. »
From Léonne in Scoop to Germaine Lauzon in Les Belles-Sœurs, passing by Donatienne in Cormoran and Jessie in Bonne nuit m’man (‘night, Mother), Francine Ruel is a composition actress who loves research and the creative process. .
“When I auditioned for Scoop, I made it really tough at first, like Léonne was portrayed in the script; inspired by Kathy Bates in Misery. But the director told me she was also sensual and liked to take big bubble baths… I turned on a dime to change gears and soften her. »
As long as she can, Francine Ruel will always want to try new things. And if that doesn’t work, “too bad, it’s no big deal,” as his mother would tell him.
Graduated from the Conservatoire d’art dramatique de Québec in the late 1960s. She taught scriptwriting at the Institut national de l’image et du son (INIS) from 1997 to 2003 and at Bishop’s University in 2007. and 2008. When the Ligue Nationale d’Improvisation was created in 1977, she participated in the very first improvisation with Claude Laroche.
In addition to her acting career, she is also an author. She writes in different literary genres (theater, novel, television, children’s stories and songs). In 1993, she received the Gemini Award for Best Performance in a Supporting Role for Scoop 3 (for her role as Léonne Vigneault).
