Xavier Dolan

Xavier Dolan-Tadros (born 20 March 1989) is a Canadian filmmaker and actor.

He began his career as a child actor in commercials before directing several arthouse feature films.

He first received international acclaim in 2009 for his feature film directorial debut, I Killed My Mother (J'ai tué ma mère), which he also starred in, wrote, and produced, and which premiered at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival in the Directors' Fortnight section and won three awards from the program.

Since 2009, he has written and directed eight feature films, all of which have premiered at Cannes, with the exception of Tom at the Farm—which premiered at the 70th Venice International Film Festival in 2013—and his first English-language film, The Death & Life of John F. Donovan, which premiered at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival.

The film premiered at the Director's Fortnight program of the 2009 Cannes Film Festival where it received an eight-minute standing ovation and won three awards: the Art Cinema Award, the SACD Prize for screenplay, and the Prix Regards Jeunes.

It also won a Lumière Award and four Jutra Awards, including Best Film, Best Screenplay, and Most Successful Film Outside Québec, beating out Denis Villeneuve's film Polytechnique (2009) in what was deemed an "upset".

Dolan later said that the film was "flawed" and Peter Brunette of The Hollywood Reporter called it "a somewhat uneven film that demonstrates a great deal of talent".

Brunette also called the film "funny and audacious", while Allan Hunter of Screen International said that it possessed "the sting of shrewdly observed truth".

The film received the Claude Jutra Award (now known as the Canadian Screen Award for Best First Feature) at the Genies, and the Toronto Film Critics Association awarded Dolan the inaugural $5,000 Jay Scott Prize for emerging talent.

I Killed My Mother was named one of Canada's Top Ten features of the year by the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and chosen as Canada's official entry for Best Foreign Language Film for the 2010 Academy Awards, though it failed to receive a nomination from the academy.

Distribution rights were later sold to more than 20 countries.

It premiered in the Un Certain Regard category at the 63e Festival de Cannes in May 2010 where it received a standing ovation.

It won the top prize of the Official Competition at the Sydney Film Festival in June and screened at several film festivals throughout 2011, but failed to find audiences in non-French-speaking countries.

It received several Genie nominations and the AQCC (Québec association of film critics) award for Best Film.

His third film, Laurence Anyways, was selected to compete in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.

Due to legal problems experienced by the film's U.S. distributor, Regent Entertainment, it was not released theatrically in the U.S. until 2013, and once released, it earned little at the box office.

The second feature film Dolan directed, Heartbeats (Les Amours imaginaires), was financed privately.

The film follows two friends who are infatuated with the same mysterious young man and their friendship suffers.

Dolan has won many accolades for his work, including the Jury Prize at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival for Mommy and the Grand Prix at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival for It's Only the End of the World. He has also won several Canadian Screen Awards and César Awards.

Outside of his own films, he has also starred in films from other directors, such as Elephant Song (2014), Boy Erased (2018), Bad Times at the El Royale (2018), It Chapter Two (2019), and Lost Illusions (2021).

In 2022, he was nominated for the César Award for Best Supporting Actor for Lost Illusions.

Dolan was born and raised in Montreal, Quebec.

He is the son of Geneviève Dolan, a Québécois public college administrator with Irish roots, and Manuel Tadros, an Egyptian-Canadian actor and singer of Coptic and Lebanese descent.

His parents divorced when he was 2 years old, leaving his mother to take care of him in suburban Montreal.

He has an older half-brother from his father's previous relationship.

He began acting at the age of 4, after his aunt, a production manager, suggested he auditioned for a minor role in a TV drama.

Most notably he starred in a series of 21 commercials for a Canadian drugstore chain, Jean Coutu.

He kept working until he was 8, when his mother, unable to cope with such a hyperactive child, sent him to boarding school in rural Quebec for 5 years.

His extensive dubbing career also started to intensify at this time, as Dolan found it hard to audition and get acting jobs.

At first it was because he was away for school and then, when he was back in Montreal, because he was "too small, too big, too young, too old for all kinds of roles", according to casting directors.

Once he completed his high school education, he decided to enroll at the College de Maisonneuve studying literature, but he will only last two months, later describing the experience as "suffocating".

Remembering his early days as an actor preceding his filmmaking debut, Dolan said:"The director of a film I made when I was seven noticed I asked a lot of questions about everything. And he pointed at the director’s chair and said: ‘in 20 years, you’re going to be sitting there.’ But that wasn’t clear to me at all. I wanted to be an actor. I became a director because I wanted to have the artistic authority to cast whoever I wanted in the lead role. I wrote my first film because I wanted to act again. I missed acting, I missed expressing things physically and emotionally."

Dolan attracted international attention with his directorial debut—a film about the complicated relationship between a mother and her teenage son—which he wrote, directed, produced and starred in at the age of 19.

He reportedly began writing the script when he was 16 years old.

Talking about the genesis of the film, actress Anne Dorval, who starred as the titular mother and will later work on numerous projects with him, stated Dolan was only 15 when he first came to see her at her dubbing studio.

The first script he gave her, Pink Wings (Les Ailes Roses) was ultimately never filmed and it was described as "four films in one" by Dorval.

As she turned him down, Dolan informed her he wasn't interested in that script anymore, and that he had decided to turn a short story he had written for French class, The Matricide (Le Matricide), into what will come to be known as I Killed My Mother (J'ai tué ma mère).

He said in an interview with Canadian newspaper Le Soleil that the film was partly autobiographical.

When, years later, he was asked how his mother had received the film, he replied:"I think it was easier for my mom to think it was just about somebody else. She said the only thing that woman and her had in common was that they were both stuck in traffic on a bridge every morning. Years later, we talked about it and she said, “When I saw the film, the first thing I said to myself was, I didn’t know he hated me that much.” But making that film, for me, was such an effort of modesty in terms of accepting what a brash, hysterical, egotistical kid I could have been and embracing the fact that I needed to be honest so the movie wouldn’t be one-dimensional. Making that movie was all about making that woman a hero and the moments mocking her are so largely outnumbered by the moments glorifying her, while demonizing him–me. So for me, it was all about saying, “Didn’t you know I loved you that much?”."

Dolan has also directed music videos, notably with Adele for her singles "Hello" (2015), and "Easy on Me" (2021), for which he received a Grammy Award for Best Music Video nomination.