'Maybe the best damned actor in the world': The rise and lull of Montreal movie star Michael Sarrazin

    Michael Sarrazin entered the world in 1940, the son of  Enid Scott and Bernard Sarrazin, a prosecuting attorney who became a Montreal city councillor and later a corporate executive in Toronto. Michael was middle kid with brothers Bernard Jr., Pierre and sister Enid Jr., who lived in relative prosperity on Grosvenor Ave. near Queen Mary.

   A young Michael sought the limelight, reciting corny jokes at family gatherings and staging marionette shows. "Maybe you think I'm an egomaniac," he'd later say, "but I've always craved recognition and attention. I never seemed to get enough of them as a kid."   

   Michael attended Loyola High School before switching over to the less-exclusive D'Arcy McGee High, on Pine Ave. near the Main, where he performed in the school's Double Blue Review and led an informal crusade against compulsory army cadet training.    

   Sarrazin made his thespian ambitions clear at the age of 17 in 1957 when he quit school and became a card-carrying professional actor. He studied the craft in Montreal workshops operated by New York's Actors' Studio, run by the esteemed Lee Strasberg, while also doing stage roles with the Trinity Players and Studio Club. 

   Sarrazin made ends meet by toiling as a dishwasher and selling toys at the Simpson's department store and even played drums for a local band. He lived a small studio apartment above a friend's handicrafts store on downtown Stanley Street, then an artistic hub. "The beginning was very tough. My early days in Montreal were virtually nothing," he would later say.  

   Sarrazin was, at the time, semi-estranged from his family, according to lifelong friend Nick Auf der Maur, a city columnist and boulevardier who recalls an evening when the two were too broke to buy beer in a tavern. Their fortunes reversed when they found a newly-purchased jacket in a box on the sidewalk, which they sold inside the tavern, allowing them to order more beers. 

  Sarrazin spent several months studying acting in New York but visa issues forced him to return to Montreal, where he borrowed $50 and left for Toronto where he acted in non-paying jobs and delivered food for a downtown café. 

  The tall, skinny, big-eyed Sarrazin caught the eyes of several directors, including Paul Almond, Eric Till and George Bloomfield, who all hired him to star in TV dramas. 

   One TV production, Romeo and Jeannette, co-starring rising-fellow Montrealer Genevieve Bujold, caught the eye of a New York city agent, who signed Sarrazin to a movie studio contract, reportedly a five year deal for $50,000 a year.

Sarrazin and Bujold

   Sarrazin, who had already had already fathered two young daughters in Montreal, went solo on his Hollywood adventure.    

   The studio set him up with small roles in movies and TV shows, none of which he took pride in, as he said in a candid 1968 interview.    

There are so many insincere, insecure parasites here. A lot of them are garbage merchants. My first year here, all they wanted me to do was absolute junk. I prostituted myself by doing some TV junk they ground out The Virginians, The Doomsday Flight. It took them 15 days to toss together a movie I was in, Gunfight at Abilene, and it was so bad they couldn't release it. 

   Sarrazin finally got a meaty role as the youthful sidekick of a fraudster played by George C. Scott in The Flim Flam Man, from 1967, which remains well-regarded. 

  

   Sarrazin later noted that the sometimes-prickly Scott took a shine to him.

He was exceptionally generous with me. I had heard rumours that he could be very temperamental, that he didn't suffer fools and stuff like that but for some reason he took me under his wing and we got along really well.

  Nonetheless, the breakthrough role didn't leave Sarrazin any happier, as evidenced in a 1968 interview. 

The Flam Flam Man has done so well at the box office they want to box me into dumb juvenile roles. Well I'm not a garbage man. All I want is to be my own man, acting in a genuine work of art. Ten years from now I'd like to see young actors in Hollywood doing their best to imitate guess who? Michael Sarrazin. 

   That same year Sarrazin met the love of his life on the set of the surf-and-beach film The Sweet Ride. Jacqueline Bisset, a rising young British actress four years his junior, was enjoying an equally rosy career trajectory. 

     The two lived together in Sarrazin's two-room apartment on the beach in Malibu where Sarrazin surfed often. Biographies of movie stars jammed his bookcase and a wall featured a large bulletin board with glowing reviews of his acting, which he called his "ego board."

      Jacqueline Bisset was profoundly smitten with Sarrazin, according to their older acquaintance,  syndicated gossip columnist Dorothy Manners, who wrote in 1975:

 I knew and liked Jackie. She was deeply in love with him. She was then far more involved with him than she was in her own career. She and Mike lived in a shack on the beach and I mean shack. She did the cooking, cleaning, washing and ironing for Mike. Even when he went on film locations Jackie would tag along to carry on the domestic chores. Mike came across as a loner, an intellectual hippie type and something of a male chauvinist.

   Sarrazin, who rarely did interviews and never appeared on a TV talk show, confirmed his ornery side in the same 1968 interview. 

    It bugs the hell out of me when I'm typecast as another Jimmy Dean or young Fonda or Brando. I feel like yelling at them. Hey you can't make a Mickey Mouse out of me! I don't want a zillion dollars. I don't want to be a carbon copy star. All I want is to be me, Michael Sarrazin, maybe the best damned actor in the world. Take me on my own terms, or I'll cut out. 

  Sarrazin, nonetheless, came off as a cheerful, boyish ne'er-do-well in his leading role in the lighthearted Eye of the Cat, set in San Francisco. He plays a young man with a cat phobia. 

   

  Sarrazin reached his career peak in a brooding role in 1969, playing the male lead opposite Jane Fonda in the acclaimed Depression-era dance marathon drama They Shot Horses, Don't They? which received nine Academy award nominations, although none related to his acting. 

   

  The success didn't hurt Sarrazin's career but nor did it launch him into the stratosphere of major stardom, as his subsequent films failed to find the same acclaim. 

   Sarrazin had been cast as co-star in the acclaimed, gritty classic Midnight Cowboy from the same year but Universal Studios declined to release Sarrazin from his contract in order to play the role, which instead went to Jon Voight. 

   But he had no trouble finding work. In 1971 Sarrazin brought his bushy hair and sad eyes to four films, including  The Pursuit of Happiness, where he portrayed a rich kid dealing with a vehicular homicide charge. 

  He also then grew a giant moustache and acted opposite his girlfriend Jacqueline Bissett in Believe in Me, as he played a meth-addicted doctor who turns his girlfriend on to speed. 

  Sarrazin acted alongside Paul Newman and Henry Fonda in Sometimes a Great Notion that same year. The film was considered a disappointment considering the strong cast and the much-loved original Ken Kesey novel. 

 

  By 1974 Sarrazin had moved to a posh house in Beverly Hills but for reasons undisclosed, he and Bisset quietly split up. "She deserves happiness and all this wonderful success she is having," he said solemnly in an interview the next year.  

  Sarrazin's sadness lurked not far from the surface. When asked what he does between pictures he betrayed his dejection. " I jog a little but mostly I fret. I drive my agent crazy. I watch my old movies on TV and see all the mistakes I made. I cry a lot. I'm a mess until I start to work again."

    Sarrazin, through this period, is believed to have missed out on major roles that might have established him as a top movie star, possibly partially due to his reluctance to publicize his work in interview or on  TV talk shows appearances.  

"It would scare the hell out of me getting up there and saying how great I am in my new picture, isn't that what the guests do?"

    Sarrazin returned with a lightweight wacky romance in 1974, starring as a cash-challenged Brooklyn cabbie alongside Barbra Striesand in For Pete's Sake, an experience that left him with many barroom anecdotes for the rest of his days.    

   Sarrazin starred the next year in The Reincarnation of Peter Proud showed Sarrazin as a haunted young man in search of his past life.  

   Sarrazin's trademark bushy hair was replaced with the slimmer hair helmet look in The Gumball Rally, a zany 1976 muscle car race romp also starring Raul Julia and Gary Busey.  

 Saturday Night Live, still relatively fledgling in its third season, acknowledged Sarrazin's star power by inviting him to host on 15 April 1978. Sarrazin offered a short monologue and a skit of himself and fellow Canadian Dan Ackroyd talking arcane hockey talk. Although Sarrazin didn't do a whole lot, the episode was considered one of top ones of the era and it cemented his identity as a hip and relevant figure.  

   The SNL appearance injected no life to his career and by 1980 Sarrazin, now 40, descended the showbiz ladder to the small screen, playing the lead Beuhlah Land, a critically-panned three-part TV series about farms in the old south.  

   Sarrazin's career was clearly waning but he remained a highly-recognized commodity, as pal Nick Auf Der Maur noted in 1980 that Sarrazin couldn't get a moment's peace when visiting Montreal, as fans constantly hounded him at restaurants and bars in his home town. 

   Sarrazin, now in his forties, found himself acting in lower-budget fare, starring in The Seduction (1982) which begins with him smooching a blonde in a hot tub. The same year he appeared in Fighting Back, a Philadelphia-based vigilante drama that failed to do as well. 

   By the mid-1980s Sarrazin found himself increasingly involved in Canadian films, appearing in small roles in Montreal-based films Joshua Then and Now and Malarek  

 

 Sarrazin entered the 1990s with TV roles on Murder She Wrote, African Skies and Sweating Bullets. By around 1992 Sarrazin had sold his Los Angeles home and permanently relocated to Montreal, where he played a tiny role as a tacky crooner in a the Quebecois movie La Florida.

 

  Sarrazin enjoyed spending time chatting at local pubs like Else's where he expressed a lot less intensity about acting than he once did.  At one point he casually agreed to star in muffler ads, a deal which later fell through. 

   Sarrazin appeared in many forgettable 1990s TV shows including La Femme Nikita, The Outer Limits, Star Trek Deep Space Nine, and TV movies like Earthquake in New York, Midnight Man, and Thunder Point. 

   Sarrazin acted less after 2000 and in about 2009 was stricken with mesothelioma, a fast-moving lung cancer often caused by asbestos exposure, the same cancer that had taken down leading man Steve McQueen in 1979. 

   He died in 2010. 

  Sarrazin ranks near the top of the list of the most successful movie stars from Montreal in Hollywood, a list which also includes William Shatner, Christopher Plummer, Genevieve Bujold and Jay Baruchel, among others.