A Kitten Purring Beethoven

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 Genevieve 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 Genevieve 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, Genevieve 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, Genevieve 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 Moliere. But Genevieve 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. Genevieve 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 Genevieve 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.

Believable Appetite. Anne of the Thousand Days, for example, is a costumer's spectacle, filled with wind and hung with tinsel. It is Bujold who renders the erotic appetite of Henry VIII believable. Anne is no standard prima donna marking pentameters until her next big speech. She is a vain coquette who is first delighted with her body when it attracts the King, then distressed and finally destroyed by it when, as Queen, she fails to produce the necessary male heir. Her doomed wail, "Oh my God, the King is mad!" almost redeems the whole overblown epic. Yet it is Bujold's very sexuality that makes her question the validity of her role as a chaste but tantalizing nymphet in the early scenes. "I don't believe that a girl like Anne Boleyn and a man like Henry can be all that time without touching each other," she says. "I am sure there was heavy petting going on."

Love of Camera. Somewhere along her way, Genevieve broke with the past; she became a lapsed Catholic. In 1967, she married a divorced Protestant, Director Paul Almond. In Almond's highly personal new film, The Act of the Heart, she stars as a St. Joan-like naive who falls fatally in love with an Augustinian priest (Donald Sutherland). The Almonds live quietly with their 20-month-old son Matthew in a rambling house overlooking Montreal, one mile from the home of Genevieve's father, who still drives his city bus on its appointed daily rounds.

It is all very, very arranged and solide, like her opinions: On minis v. midis: "I dress in whatever way excites the man I'm with." On movies: "I confess it, I love the camera. When it's not on me I'm not quite alive." On acting: "As soon as they say 'Action' I can smell in the first two seconds whether I am going to get on the wave or not. And if you don't get on you have this disastrous feeling, I can tell you--it's like love without climax." On Women's Liberation types: "I think they're all warped or something."

Though flattering offers are made weekly, she remains uncommitted to a single project. Despite her firm opinions on everything else, she seems not to have made up her mind about herself. "I have signed no contract with anyone," she says. "I don't know where to go next or how to get there." But she is not likely to hesitate long when someone finally points the way. "I like being told what to do," says Genevieve Bujold. "I wish someone would tell me what to do."

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