Micheline Lanctôt

Lanctôt was born in Frelighsburg, Quebec. Her post-secondary education was in music, fine arts, and theatre at Collège Jésus-Marie in Outremont, and in art history at the Université de Montréal and the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal; she later studied film animation at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and then at Gerald Potterton's studios, Potterton Productions, where she remained for four years.

Lanctôt began her acting career in 1972, winning a Canadian Film Award for Best Actress for her starring role in Gilles Carle's The True Nature of Bernadette (La vraie nature de Bernadette). Since then, she has appeared in a wide variety of film and television roles, such as Carle's The Heavenly Bodies (Les Corps Célestes), Ted Kotcheff's award-winning The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Claude Chabrol's Blood Relatives and Guy Fournier's Radio-Canada TV series Jamais deux sans toi.

She has directed for the theatre also, directing Oleanna by David Mamet for the Théâtre de Quat'Sous in Montreal in 1994, and in 1999, Bousille et les justes by Gratien Gélinas for the Théâtre du Rideau Vert.

She began her live-action film-directing career with The Handyman (L'Homme à tout faire) (1980), nominated for best direction and for best film at the Genie Awards in 1981. This success was followed by Sonatine (1984), which launched the career of Pascale Bussières and won both the Genie Award for Best Director at the 6th Genie Awards in 1985, and the now-defunct Silver Lion for Best First Film (1983-1987) at the 41st Venice International Film Festival.

Since 1982, Lanctôt has been a part-time instructor in the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University.

Lanctôt defended Gaétan Soucy's novel The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches (La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes) in the 2004 edition of Le Combat des livres, broadcast on Première Chaîne.

In 2016 she was the curator of the Festival Vues dans la tête de... film festival in Rivière-du-Loup. She is also a matron of the Prix collégial du cinéma québécois, an annual program engaging film studies students in Quebec CEGEPs to present an award for the year's best Quebec film.