Seventy-year-old Canadian-born film actor Michael Sarrazin died after a battle with cancer on April 17 in Montreal, Canada.
Sarrazin was tall and possessed a pair of the most incredible, soulful eyes that were distinctively wide and sunken. He had a long career in acting without, however, reaching the status of a superstar.
This lean actor, with his off-beat personality, youthful good looks and intriguingly faraway look, often enhanced a number of quality films which, however, failed to attract large audiences and so his popularity was limited.
Jacques Michael André Sarrazin was born on May 22, 1940 in Quebec City, Canada. Not much is known of his family and childhood other than that soon after he was born the family moved to Montreal, where the young Sarrazin attended eight different schools before eventually dropping out.
During his teens Sarrazin worked in various jobs, including at a Toronto theatre, on television and for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He also studied acting at the Actors’ Studio in New York and played parts in short historical documentaries for the National Film Board of Canada.
Through one of them, he was noticed by Hollywood talent scouts and was taken to the film capital, where he signed with Universal Pictures.
Sarrazin’s first work as an actor was in small roles in several television series and TV movies.
One of the latter was The Doomsday Flight (1966), which was also released in cinemas in some countries, including Malta. His official feature film debut was the post-Civil War drama Gunfight in Abilene (1967).
Sarrazin got noticed by critics and the public with his second feature, The Flim Flam Man (1967, released in Malta as One Born Every Minute). In it, he and George C. Scott play two con artists on the run. He followed this with two westerns: A Man Called Gannon and Journey to Shiloh (both 1968).
Sarrazin then made the suspense thriller Eye of the Cat (1969) before portraying what is considered to be the best role of his career – that of a loner who took part in a dance marathon during the Depression in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969).
The film won an Oscar in the Best Actor category for Gig Young and received eight other nominations, but Sarrazin was overlooked. However, he was nominated as the Most Promising Newcomer in the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA).
Sarrazin kept diversifying his roles and was never typecast. He was a charming stranger in the romantic film In Search of Gregory (1970), and a hippie in Sometimes a Great Notion (1971, released in Malta as Never Give an Inch).
Sarrazin then went to his roots in Canada to do the espionage thriller The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972). Back in Hollywood he scored another success in the TV movie Frankenstein: The True Story (1973), in which he played the monster in a different vein from that we are accustomed to.
The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975) proved to be Sarrazin’s last good film; from then on, his career started to go downhill. He was wasted as Barbra Streisand’s husband in the slapstick comedy For Pete’s Sake (1974); The Gumball Rally (1976) was only of interest to car enthusiasts; and, although taken from a James Michener’s novel, Caravans (1978) had nothing going for it except its music and scenery.
The 1980s definitely started the worst in Sarrazin’s film appearances with films like The Seduction, Fighting Back (both 1982), Captive Hearts (1987) and Crackerjack 2 (1997), which were mostly Canadian productions. He spent most of the rest of his career working on television. His last feature film appearance was in FeardotCom (2002).
Sarrazin never married but he had a 10-year relationship with the actress Jacqueline Bisset, with whom he made three films: The Sweet Ride (1968), Believe in Me (1971) and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972). He also has two daughters, Michelle and Catherine, but there is nothing to indicate that Bisset is their mother.