Oscar night is an involuntary collaboration between DeMille and DeSade. As the television cameras pan the contestants and the critics pan the show, muscles twitch, words are flubbed, sweat drenches dinner jackets and gowns. No such problems are likely to bother Geneviève Bujold. Nominated for her starring role opposite Richard Burton in Anne of the Thousand Days, the Canadian actress can hardly wait for the eve of April 7. "I like moments of density," she says. "The odds are heavily against me. But even if I lose, the moment of loss will stay with me until I die."
That pragmatic philosophy would sound right issuing from the clenched lips of Nominee Dustin Hoffman, who declines to attend the spectacle. But from the bow lips of the narrow-shouldered lass with the French intonations? Tiens, it is like a kitten purring Beethoven. And Geneviève insists that there are more at home like her. "European women—they're so exaggerated," she declares. "Like Frenchwomen, they're such bitches. They look at each other, not men. And American women—they have no secrets. The best women—I have to say it—are Canadians. No one has noticed us for so long."
Without a Net. If the discovery of Canadian women is to be the Yukon of the '70s, the credit will be due, in large part, to their saleswoman. Born in Montreal, Geneviève went through the familiar Catholic training. "For twelve years I was in a convent school," she recalls. "Everything was very comme il faut, very strict, but I remained myself." Then she was caught by one of the sisters reading a proscribed volume, Marcel Pagnol's Fanny. On the school's insistence, Geneviève made her first big exit. Soon afterward she enrolled in the Province of Quebec Conservatory of Drama.
There the discipline proved as rigid as the convent's, with classical presentations of Racine, Corneille and Molière. But Geneviève could never quite adhere to any tradition. Two months before graduation, she was offered a part in a professional production of The Barber of Seville. She took a leap without a net. "A diploma can't get you work in the theater," she decided. "But a part can." It did. She took parts with a repertory company and caromed around Europe. In Paris, Director Alain Resnais was looking for a young girl to co-star as Yves Montand's adolescent amour in La Guerre Est Finie. Geneviève transferred from the Parisian television screen to the film scene without missing a cue. She appeared opposite Alan Bates and Jean-Paul Belmondo, once as a madwoman, then as a spoiled heiress. The parts pinched a bit, but somehow Geneviève let out the seams and made them star-sized.
Partly it was her accented voice that did it—hesitant at the surface, confident underneath, like the upper register of a cello. Partly it was the dark, liquid eyes, staring past the camera in what her admirers described as hypnotic lust and what her ophthalmologist analyzed as acute myopia. But after all, there have been hundreds of promising starlets with shiny eyes, trained voices and good bones. With Bujold what made the difference was the ability to meld the parts and the actress into something special.