Xavier Dolan

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.