Celebrity Biographies
Jean-Marc Vallee
Although he directed few titles, he turned heads with “Dallas Buyers Club” and the “Big Little Lies” series. The Canadian director and producer Jean-Marc Vallée died at the age of 58, on December 26, 2021, in the cabin where he lived in Quebec “suddenly”, according to his representative, who has not added more details. . “He was a brilliant filmmaker, infusing each scene with deeply visceral and emotional truth,” explains an HBO statement.
Born in Montreal on March 9, 1963, Jean-Marc Vallée was the eldest of four children. He studied Film at College Ahuntsic and the University of Quebec, in Montreal. He started his career in 1985 as a music video director. After several shorts, he made his feature film debut with Black List, which was very successful in Canada, followed by Los Locos , a western starring Mario Van Peebles . In these early works he already exhibited a very personal style, marked by the fact that he shot with natural light, and gave the actors freedom to improvise. “It’s my way of giving importance to the characters, so I try not to interfere too much in the performances,” he said at the time.
Jean-Marc Vallée burst onto the international scene with CRAZY directed and written by him, based on his childhood memories. He was following in the footsteps of Zachary Beaulie, a young man from a conservative family. Martin Scorsese produced his next work, Queen Victoria , with Emily Blunt playing the British monarch in her youth. An expert on the British monarchy, Julian Fellowes ( The Crown ) , wrote the script.
After the romantic film Café de Flore , with Vanessa Paradis, Jean-Marc Vallée created his most relevant work, Dallas Buyers Club , from 2013, a reconstruction of the true story of Ron Woodroof, an electrician diagnosed with AIDS, who was given 30 days of life. Matthew McConaughey won the Oscar for best actor, while Jared Leto triumphed in the supporting actor category.
After Wild Soul , with Reese Witherspoon as a woman who undertakes a long march alone through the mountains and the desert, to reflect on her existential crossroads, Jean-Marc Vallée triumphed in the field of series, as director and executive producer of Big Little Lies , again with Witherspoon , accompanied by Nicole Kidman and Shailene Woodley . Adapts a novel by Liane Moriarty, which intersects the lives of several upper-class women from a residential neighborhood in Monterrey, California. “I had never shot anything like it, but I realized that HBO was shooting big productions, so I agreed to read the scripts and I was seduced. I filmed as I always did. I started with the first three chapters, as if they were a feature film, then we took a I rest and we finish the rest. Physically and emotionally it was more complicated than I thought, but I don’t regret it,” he commented in an interview. She repeated on television with Open Wounds , another miniseries, which adapted a novel by Gillian Flynn , author of Lost , which she was a screenwriter. Amy Adams gave life to a journalist who investigates the disappearance of two girls.
Before his death, Jean-Marc Vallée was working on a feature film, to which he had not yet given a title, about a young man returning home after a long period of rehabilitation. Little is known about the personal life of the filmmaker, who leaves behind two children, Alex and Émile. In 2020 he had been made an Officer of the National Order of Quebec.