Julien Poulin in "Bob Gratton, Ma Vie, My Life", winner for best actor in a drama at the 2007 Gémeaux Awards Sept. 9, 2007 in Montreal.DAVID BOILY/The Canadian Press
In 1996, Rafaël Ouellet worked on the set of an ad promoting the Nez rouge campaign, a volunteer-run safe ride service offered around the Christmas holidays in Quebec.
That year’s spokesperson was actor Julien Poulin, well-known for his political stances for Quebec sovereignty and against American imperialism; his best-known character, Bob Gratton, was a federalist caricature.
Mr. Ouellet, now an accomplished filmmaker, was star struck. He was eager to gain Mr. Poulin’s respect but felt like he had made a fatal mistake that morning by wearing, without thinking, a T-shirt with a THX logo, a company tied to Hollywood filmmaker George Lucas, and thus a symbol of the United States’ cultural hegemony. But the friendly, ever-unassuming Mr. Poulin did not care.
“I was really stressed out,” Mr. Ouellet said in a phone interview. “And then at some point, Julien, who had no reason to talk to me – I was an assistant producer – he came to see me and said: ‘Hey boy, could you find me a Coke when you have a chance?’”
Over a career spanning six decades, Mr. Poulin starred in dozens of television series, plays and movies, some of which he also directed. Showcasing an exceptional range, he raised consciousnesses, played jester, moved audiences and became a fixture of modern Quebec’s collective understanding of itself as a people. He remained, however, a discreet, humble man seemingly always carrying a deep melancholy.
Mr. Poulin died on Jan. 4, at the age of 78. His family, through his agent Eugénie Gaillard, declined to provide the cause of his death.
Years after they met on the Nez Rouge shoot, Mr. Ouellet reached out to Mr. Poulin to play Germain, a trucker eaten away by guilt after being involved in a fatal crash, in Camion. The film earned Mr. Poulin a Jutra award (now Iris) for best actor in 2013. It was his second Jutra, after winning in the best supporting actor category in 2000 for his role in the police drama Le dernier souffle. Between those, he won a Gémeau award in 2007 for best supporting actor as nightclub doorman Gaétan in the series Minuit, le soir.
But for most Quebeckers, Mr. Poulin remains tied to the clumsy, boisterous lunatic Bob Gratton, which he created with his long-time friend, filmmaker and Quebec sovereigntist militant Pierre Falardeau.
A response to the first failed referendum for Quebec’s independence in 1980, Gratton is a cartoonish, conservative garage owner and Elvis Presley impersonator who despises Quebec sovereigntists and unions. An admirer of all things American who sports a Maple Leaf flag bathing suit, he is the archetype of what the filmmakers saw as a Quebecker with a “colonized” mentality. The character first appeared in three short films in the early 1980s, combined in 1985 in Elvis Gratton : Le King des kings, which became a cult movie in Quebec. Two more movies and a TV series followed between 1999 and 2009.
Mr. Poulin, who in real life could not be more different than Gratton, was proud of the character’s enduring power but uneasy with his close association with the role. For a time, he felt like the public and casting filmmakers confounded the artist and the character, restricting his opportunities. His talent nonetheless carried him elsewhere.
Recent movies starring Mr. Poulin include Séraphin: Un homme et son péché, Monica la mitraille, Babine, Paul à Québec, Embrasse-moi comme tu m’aimes and Arsenault et Fils. He also played roles in many series such as Virginie, Les Bougon, Le Négociateur, Rock et Rolland, Tu m’aimes-tu?, Les Pays d’en haut and Unité 9.
“In the space of a second he goes from making us laugh to moving us because he is a man of great humanity who is very, very funny but who gives off a vulnerability,” said actor and playwright Fabien Cloutier, who worked with Mr. Poulin on his TV series Léo.
Julien Poulin was born on April 20, 1946, in Montreal, in a working-class family. He grew up with a younger sister, Marguerite, who wrote on social media that their childhood was “filled with love.” In addition to his sister, Mr. Poulin leaves his son, Alexis Poulin.
He studied on a scholarship at the Collège de Montréal, a private school where he met Mr. Falardeau and had his first experience of theatre, both of which would shape his life for decades to come.
In interviews, Mr. Poulin said he felt disoriented in the school environment and was a turbulent teenager. The priests who were running the college at the time put him in a school play, he said, initially as a form of punishment.
“They forced me to clown around on stage at the end of the year because I was too undisciplined,” he told Radio-Canada in 1999. “And then by doing that, I realized I could find a place for myself.”
Mr. Poulin made Mr. Falardeau laugh by playing pranks, and the two became close friends. “Maybe he didn’t think he was funny, but I pissed my pants when I saw him,” Mr. Falardeau told Radio-Canada in 1995.
Mr. Poulin graduated from the Collège de Montréal in 1965 and immediately started his career on stage. He did so first with the La Roulotte theatre company and, in 1974, co-founded the Groupe de la Veillée with other actors including Marie Eykel, who was his life partner for more than two decades. He made his cinema debut in Denys Arcand’s Réjeanne Padovani in 1973.
It is Mr. Falardeau who first introduced Mr. Poulin to Quebeckers’ struggle for independence. The duo made several political films, including Pea Soup (1978), an ethnographic collage of Quebec society and its divide between a French-speaking proletariat and an English-speaking elite, and the short Speak White (1980), a reading of Michèle Lalonde’s famous poem, on the same theme.
Mr. Poulin was devastated by the defeats of the “Yes” camp in both referendums on Quebec’s sovereignty-association in 1980 and 1995. Denise Mercier, an early collaborator who played Bob Gratton’s wife, Linda, was with him and Mr. Falardeau on that first fateful night.
After learning about results in a Montreal arena, they went to Mr. Poulin’s place and climbed on the roof, she recalled in a phone interview. “There was crying and screaming and then we looked at the city in the distance,” singing a Jacques Brel song: “La ville s’endormait, j’en oublie le nom.” (Translation: “The city was falling asleep, I am forgetting the name”; it was a play on words, since in French the final word, “nom,” sounds the same as “Non,” the winning side in the referendum.)
Collaborators and friends described Mr. Poulin as a timid, sensitive man who did not want to disturb anyone, almost a wallflower. In interviews, he seemed self-conscious and hesitant with hosts, often averting their gaze and laughing nervously. His greatest fear, he said in 1999, was “not to be loved.”
Contrary to the polemist Mr. Falardeau, Mr. Poulin never courted controversy. But in 2006, he was photographed with a Hezbollah flag during a demonstration in favour of a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon. He apologized and spent a painful few months avoiding questions about the incident before explaining, in an interview on the talk show Tout le monde en parle, that he had spontaneously and briefly exchanged his Quebec flag for the other with a young man at the rally in a gesture of solidarity.
The actor was deeply curious, an avid reader – particularly of Vaclav Havel’s work, and a bit of a loner. Pierre-Paul Alain, an actor and a friend, said Mr. Poulin liked to hike in the woods around his cabin in Sainte-Béatrix, about 80 kilometres north of Montreal, or take out his hammock and listen to the nearby river.
Mr. Alain, who was a teenager when he met Mr. Poulin on one of the Elvis Gratton sets, said the older actor was a father figure and a mentor who introduced him to Marlon Brando movies and was always ready to offer advice or an attentive ear.
“When he asked you a question,” Mr. Alain said in a phone interview, “he expected a real answer.”
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