With his gaunt, angular features and piercing gaze, this charismatic French-Canadian leading actor won considerable acclaim onstage in the early and mid-1980s and began starring in well-received art-house films near the end of the decade. An award-winning actor for his work in French-speaking theater in Montreal, Lothaire Bluteau enjoyed a major breakthrough with his role as the theater director obsessed with a modernized staging of the Passion and his performance as Jesus in Denys Arcand's striking satirical drama, "Jesus of Montreal" (1989).
Bluteau later made an acclaimed debut upon the London stage with his fiery performance as a murderous gay hustler in "Being at Home with Claude" (1991). He confirmed his talent for enigmatic heroes pained by troubles both physical and metaphysical with his fine work as a French Jesuit missionary making a harrowing journey to a remote mission outpost in Bruce Beresford's powerful "Black Robe" (1991). After bringing an imposing presence to the role of the Khan in Sally Potter's time-spanning, often whimsically gender-bending take on Virginia Woolf, "Orlando" (1992), Bluteau continued in a somewhat lighter vein with Krzysztof Zanussi's quietly comic romance, "The Silent Touch" (1993). Robert Lepage's "The Confessional" (1995) brought the actor raves for his deeply emotional portrayal of a man searching for the father of his adoptive brother in 1950s Quebec. More recently, he was Maurice Girodias, wounded by Valerie Solanas, in "I Shot Andy Warhol" and briefly appeared as the doomed fiance of Juliette Binoche's Hana in Anthony Minghella's Oscar-winning "The English Patient" (both 1996). Director Sean Mathias tapped Bluteau to portray Horst, the openly gay concentration camp inmate, in the feature version of Martin Sherman's acclaimed play "Bent" (1997).
Bluteau has also played in numerous French-language Canadian film with limited foreign distribution. He was a young rocker in "Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin" (1988), Carole Laure's lover in "La Nuit avec Hortense" (1988) and a man on death row in "Mourir", a 1987 short. On Canadian TV, he has starred in "Les Enfants mal aimees" and "Les Jeunes delinquants" as well as in the Canadian-French co-production, "Les Fils de la liberte". American audiences first saw Bluteau as a hired killer in a 1986 episode of "Miami Vice" and he was alongside Angela Lansbury in the 1992 CBS TV-movie "Mrs. 'arris Goes to Paris."