Template:Realworld
... as Captain Nicole Janeway
Geneviève Bujold (born 1 July 1942; age 81) from Montréal, Québec is a French-Canadian actress. She was the first choice of the producers of Star Trek: Voyager to play Captain Nicole Janeway. She quit after a day and a half of shooting, with the public reason being she was unaccustomed to the hectic pace of television filming. Other rumored reasons included dissatisfaction with her performance on the part of the producers and dissatisfaction with the character on the part of Bujold. As Rick Berman politely put it in the October 8-14, 1994 issue of TV Guide: "It was immediately obvious it was not a good fit." The producers subsequently hired TV veteran Kate Mulgrew, and changed the captain's first name from Nicole to Kathryn at Mulgrew's advice.
In 2006, Rick Berman shed more light on Bujold's departure from the series. "This was a woman, who in no way, was able to deal with the rigors of episodic television." He tried telling his feeling about Bujold to Voyager co-creators Jeri Taylor and Michael Piller, who assured Berman that it was not going to be a problem. Berman recounted some of Bujold's problems on set of "Caretaker", from her having trouble with memorizing seven pages of dialogue a day, wanting to not have her hair touched up by hair dressers or from having to work with a director she did not know. He also added that after working on the set during the second day of shooting, Bujold went to her trailer in tears. Later, both "Caretaker" director Winrich Kolbe and Berman met with her there and asked her to go home. [1]
As a young woman in the '60s, Bujold starred in international "art" films such as Le Roi de Coeur (King of Hearts) and Anne of the Thousand Days, in which she played Anne Boleyn opposite Richard Burton as Henry VIII; for that role, she was nominated for an Academy Award and won a Golden Globe Award.
She would have been the second Montreal native to play a Star Trek captain, after William Shatner.
External links
- Geneviève Bujold at Wikipedia
- Template:IMDb-link
- Bujold as Captain Nicole Janeway - video on YouTube
- Bujold as Captain Nicole Janeway - video on YouTube