The Transnational Career of Geneviève Bujold

Abstract

On September 1, 1994, Paramount studios announced that Geneviève Bujold, the Montreal-born bilingual Francophone star of such films as Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) and Coma (1978), would be the first female to command a starship in the latest version of the popular Star Trek series. But after only two days of filming Star Trek: Voyager, Bujold walked off the set, making it clear she had no intention of returning. Among Star Tr e k fans this brief incident propelled Bujold to infamy as the actress who could have been Captain Janeway—leaving open to speculation the degree of stardom Bujold might have attained if she had continued with the series. Indisputably, Star Trek: Voyager would have brought Bujold closer to being a household name than anything she had achieved through her previous 30 years of film work. The scenario would have most likely resembled that of British-born, Shakespearean-trained Patrick Stewart who is undoubtedly better known for his portrayal of Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation and his subsequent roles in the X-Men franchise than for any of his previous film appearances or theater work with The Royal Shakespeare Company. In keeping with the Star Trek franchise’s propensity for injecting the series with a dose of dramatic prestige, Bujold, like her predecessors Patrick Stewart and William Shatner, is also a classically trained theater actress, having studied at Montreal’s Conservatory of Dramatic Art. And like Stewart, Bujold’s foreignness and accent-inflected English also added an extra patina of sophistication to the role. The few completed sequences of Bujold in the role of Voyager’s Captain suggest the gravitas that this experience and background would have brought to the role.