Popular Quebec actor Michel Côté was known as ‘Mr. Box Office’

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As Michel Côté was shooting the third and last season of Omertà (1996 to 1999), in which he played a rugged but righteous cop with unorthodox methods, fellow actor Richard Robitaille was making his debut on the popular Quebec TV show.

“I was very nervous,” recalled Mr. Robitaille, whose first scene was a face-to-face with Mr. Côté, already one of Quebec’s favourite comedians.

“I could barely breathe and speak,” Mr. Robitaille said. “He looks at me, he says: ‘You know, everyone knows it’s your first shoot, I know it. You can mess it up.’ He says: ‘I can’t.’”

But when they started to shoot, Mr. Côté got his lines wrong again and again, said Luc Dionne, who wrote the series. “He would say something, he would change a line, and then he would say: ‘Sorry Richard, I got this wrong.’ And we knew it was just to put Richard at ease,” which instantly worked.

“He was like that, Michel,” Mr. Dionne said.

Michel Côté, 72, died on May 29, in Montreal, a little more than a year after announcing that he was retiring from public life due to an unspecified bone marrow disease, which several friends later said was an incurable cancer.

During a career spanning nearly five decades and numerous prominent roles in successful plays, television series, and movies, including most notably a conservative father struggling to accept his son’s homosexuality in Jean-Marc Vallée’s drama C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005), Mr. Côté left an indelible mark on Quebec’s popular culture.

“He was a great actor,” said Le Devoir newspaper film critic Odile Tremblay, pointing at his versatility and sensitivity, the latter apparent even in his most comical roles.

Radio-Canada film critic Helen Faradji said he would be remembered “as a popular actor, in the noble sense of the term,” who radiated charisma.

Friends, colleagues, and collaborators remember Mr. Côté as a humble man, a generous performer and a great storyteller.

“He had an absolutely extraordinary sense of humour,” said Denise Robert, who produced some of his series and movies, including his last feature film, De père en flic 2 (2017).

“Michel and I, until the end of his life, we talked on the phone and we laughed a lot,” said fellow actor Marc Messier, with whom Mr. Côté created and starred in Broue (1979), which in 2006 set a Guinness world record as the longest-running play with the same cast.

They went on to perform it 3,322 times before retiring from their roles in 2017.

“What I liked a lot about him professionally is that he never took anything for granted,” Mr. Messier said. “At the last representation, we still gave each other notes,” he said, laughing.

Michel Côté was born on June 25, 1950, in Alma, a town in the Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean region of Quebec, nearly 500 kilometres north of Montreal. Growing up with two brothers in a loving, working-class family, he received encouragement from his parents to pursue his acting ambitions.

After graduating from the National Theatre School in 1973, he went to audition for Radio-Canada. The aspiring actor, who already had a gravelly voice he said made him a natural fit for playing elders in acting school – something he did not like – was denied an audition because of that voice.

“The lady who was managing the auditions, an English speaker, she said: ‘No, look, you should consider another job,’” he recalled in a 2015 radio interview for Radio-Canada. “I found it hard, honestly, I doubted.”

But he did not give up. With Mr. Messier, Marcel Gauthier, and Véronique Le Flaguais, now his widow, they created a theatre company, effectively hiring and directing themselves.

They rented a space on Montreal’s Saint Laurent Boulevard – then far from the hip, gentrified area it is today – and built stands for a few dozen spectators. They produced one play a year; their fourth was Broue, which in French refers to the foamy top of a freshly poured beer.

The comedy, born after Quebec outlawed all-male taverns, was seen by 3.4 million spectators over 38 years and gave Mr. Côté the financial stability to choose his next roles.

According to Ms. Tremblay, he revealed his acting talent in Au clair de la lune (1983), a comedy from André Forcier with fantastic elements, which remains among the critic’s favourite movies. “He had a role of great poetry, he was absolutely wonderful,” she said.

Other notable films include T’es belle, Jeanne (1988), which earned him a Gémeaux award for best actor, Cruising Bar (1989), a wildly successful comedy where Mr. Côté played four caricatural characters trying to hook up with women, and C.R.A.Z.Y., which earned him a Genie Award (now the Canadian Screen Awards) and a Jutra Award (now the Iris Awards) for best actor.

On television, Quebeckers remember Mr. Côté for his performances as officer Pierre Gauthier in Omertà, the cartoonish but lovable Jean-Lou in the province’s cult-classic comedy La Petite Vie (1993 to 1998), and Radio-Canada’s end of year review shows, the Bye Byes, which all earned him Gémeaux awards.

Mr. Côté said he deliberately chose varied roles so that audiences would not get tired of seeing him playing the same part.

“We see him in thrillers, dramas, comedies, without him ever being completely identified with one of these genres,” Ms. Faradji said. “He made us cry and laugh, he scared us and moved us, he played [bad guys] as well as good guys, and every time, with the same intensity … his versatility was impressive.”

But his comfort zone, he admitted, was comedy.

“Making people laugh is the best drug,” he said in a 2020 video interview with Éléphant, an organization digitizing and restoring Quebec movies, and he craved it. “Sometimes, I went to see Cruising Bar at the Berri [theatre]. I dressed up and I was in the middle of the room just to feel people laughing,” he said.

On set, he could always alleviate tension with a joke, said actor Pierre-Luc Brillant, who played one of Mr. Côté's sons in C.R.A.Z.Y.

He nonetheless took his work seriously. When playing Robert Piché, a pilot who saved 306 lives by landing an aircraft after it lost all power, Mr. Côté insisted that Mr. Piché show him how he manoeuvred in a cockpit replica built for the set. The actor spent a lot of time with the pilot to study his behaviour and emotions, inviting him home for days at a time, and the two remained close, Mr. Piché said.

Piché: entre ciel et terre (2010) ended up selling more than any other movie that year in Quebec, a regular feat for Mr. Côté's films, which earned him the nickname of “Mr. Box Office” in the industry.

This did not mean he was immune to failure. Cruising Bar 2 (2008), notably, was named the worst movie of the year by Infoman, a satirical current events show (it nonetheless won Téléfilm Canada’s Guichet d’Or award for the French-language Canadian film with the highest-grossing domestic box-office sales that year).

Mr. Côté built his lengthy resume by consistently shooting one movie a year, meaning he often said no. Thanks to this, “I am convinced I succeeded in both my family life and my career,” he told Éléphant.

Mr. Côté leaves his wife, Ms. Le Flaguais; his sons, Maxime Le Flaguais and Charles Côté; and three grandchildren.

As a father, he told Radio-Canada, he struggled the most with his sons’ adolescence, which is why he identified so easily with his role as Gervais Beaulieu in C.R.A.Z.Y. The austere dad, a relatable family member to all of Quebec, won audiences’ hearts by singing Charles Aznavour’s classics and slowly reconciling with his gay son, the same year that Canada legalized same-sex marriage.

“When he passed away, I think there are thousands or even millions of people who lost a friend,” said François Doré, a retired police officer who worked with Mr. Côté to prepare him for his Omertà role. “He was everyone’s friend.”