Roy Dupuis was born on April 21, 1963, in New Liskeard, Ontario. He spent a significant portion of his childhood in Amos, Québec, where he learned to speak French, and later in Kapuskasing, Ontario, where he learned to speak English. His father was a traveling salesman for Canada Packers, and his mother is a piano teacher. He has a younger brother and an older sister. After his parents divorced, his mother moved the family to Sainte-Rose, Laval, Québec, where he finished high school.
Acting was not Roy Dupuis' first career choice, but he was inspired by Ariane Mnouchkine's film Molière (1978). He entered the National Theatre School of Canada (L'École nationale de théâtre du Canada) after a friend backed out of an audition, and he impressed the school's director so much that she invited him to apply formally for admission to the school, and he was accepted. After his graduation in 1986, he began to be offered substantial roles in films and TV.
The relative anonymity that he enjoyed during those early years ended when 80% of the population of Québec watched the enormously popular classic period serial drama Les filles de Caleb (1990),turning him into a celebrity overnight and gaining him several awards for his performance as Emilie's husband, Ovila Pronovost. His next major role was as a journalist in the Canadian TV series Scoop (1992),which ran for four seasons.
In 1991 Dupuis also starred in his first major film role, as the gay hustler, Yves, in Jean Beaudin's internationally acclaimed Being at Home with Claude (1992),which was Canada's official selection at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival. Other leading roles in French followed, and increasingly English language roles too, including Becker in Screamers (1995),his entry into mainstream US cinema.
For the next five years, from 1996 to 2000, he spent most of his time in Toronto, making the TV series Nikita (1997-2001),which was shown in more than 50 countries around the world. When the final season finished production at the end of 2000, Roy returned to Montréal, for a few months' rest, before starting work again on French-Canadian projects made closer to home.
In 2003, he participated in multiple projects, combining leading roles with occasional supporting roles. In Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions (2003),Dupuis again played a minor part as a police drug-unit detective. Released in 2004 to 2005 were six more films in which he performed. His role as Alexandre in Mémoires affectives (2004) brought him his first major film-acting awards.
He recently reprised the part of French-Canadian hockey hero Maurice "Rocket" Richard (for the third time) in the film The Rocket (2005) directed by Charles Binamé to large acclaim. He has also completed an independent film, That Beautiful Somewhere (2006),which is based on the 1992 novel "Loon," by Bill Plumstead; screened in major film festivals beginning in August 2006, it was broadcast on Canadian pay television later in 2006 and opened in April 2006.
Beginning in June 2006, he began filming the film Shake Hands with the Devil (2006) on location in Kigali, Rwanda, a film about the Rwandan Genocide, in which Dupuis portrays Roméo Dallaire, being based on Dallaire's autobiographical memoir, in close consultation with Dallaire. The main filming finished in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in August 2006. After being screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 9, 2007, and the Atlantic Film Festival on September 13, it opens on September 28, 2007.
In October 2006, in Québec, he began filming Emotional Arithmetic (2007),starring alongside Gabriel Byrne, Christopher Plummer, Susan Sarandon, and Max von Sydow. The film is the closing feature for the Toronto International Film Festival on September 15, 2007.
Roy Dupuis lives in the countryside outside of Montréal. While, in the past, he enjoyed sky-diving and still enjoys golf, he has become more occupied with learning to sail and renovations on his home and sailboats.
For over a decade, until June 2006, he actively supported the Mira Foundation, which provides guide dogs for visually-impaired children and adults and service dogs for those with other disabilities. A few years ago, he co-founded the Rivers Foundation to protect the rivers of Canada from exploitation by hydro-electric developments, serves as its co-president, and concentrates considerable time on developing it when he is not working professionally.
