by Seán McGovern
Today we celebrate the 75th birthday of Québécoise actress Geneviève Bujold, one of the lesser-lauded Francophone talents. Apart from having a wonderful name to pronounce (dinner with Geneviève Bujold and René Auberjonois, perhaps?), she has more than 70 films under her belt. Instead of doing a retrospective of an actresses who not all of us might know or appreciate, consider this an introduction to some of her greatest work, including Anne of a Thousand Days, Dead Ringers and of course, not Star Trek: Voyager.
The best place to start is with the film that launched her internationally and gained her sole Best Actress Oscar nomination. Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) pits Bujold against Richard Burton's King Henry VIII. As the young Boleyn, Bujold is the object of the demands and affections of the King, who recently having disposed of his previous wife and grown bored of Anne's sister, places his gaze on the 18 year old. Pauline Kael said at the time that the film "isn't exciting" but made remarks that likely turned Bujold's limitations into skills to come in later films, that she "does wonders with the part, but she's too tight, too self-contained. One admirers her as an actress but does not warm to her."
The 70s was a decade that turned this chilliness into the right roles and subsequent hits followed. 1976's Obsession by Brian de Palma was followed swifty in '78 with Michael Crichton's Coma, two tense and suspenseful films that were also big box office. And credit to Bujold:MGM didn't have confidence that a female lead would work in Coma and considered casting Paul Newman, disregarding the fact that the protagonist in the novel was female. Films like these are such time capsules of 70s cinema and this is where Bujold's style is most confident: paranoid, icy and tightly wrought.
By 1988 came the other film that is always mentioned in the same breath as Anne, Cronenberg's classic Dead Ringers, with Bujold returning to the hospital, this time as actress Claire Niveau who falls foul of twins Bev and Elliot Mantle (Jeremy Irons). The stars of the film are indeed the twins, but Bujold is where the audience directs its fears, with us knowing the manipulation that Bujold is under but no way to let her know. It also gives Bujold a Cronenbergian set piece to play with, tearing apart the brothers in the dream sequence clip below, which although not gratuitous is really, really gross.
Yet it's a role that she didn't play that also drew attention to her for more unfortunate reasons. Bujold was the original Captain Elizabeth Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager but quit after a day of shooting the pilot. Bujold was eventually replaced by Kate Mulgrew and Elizabeth became Kathryn. News reports at the time noted that Bujold's departure put the production of the show in jeopardy, the official statement saying that Bujold "realized that the rigors of episodic television were too demanding." But the clips that surfaced of Bujold may have indicated that she wasn't really into it, echoing some of Pauline Kael's observations from 1970.
Bujold continues to work, mostly in Canada in independent films, but her mark has been made and her legacy of the 1970s and 80s remains. Bujold fans - what do you recommend? Are you a huge fan of Earthquake? Tightrope? Alex & the Gypsy?