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Actress and former senator Viola Léger dead at 92

She is best known for playing La Sagouine, the endearing icon of Acadia.

Acadian-Canadian actress and former Canadian senator Viola Léger attends the 2013 Governor General's performing arts awards gala at the National Arts Centre on June 1, 2013. Léger received Lifetime Artistic Achievement award.
Acadian-Canadian actress and former Canadian senator Viola Léger attends the 2013 Governor General's performing arts awards gala at the National Arts Centre on June 1, 2013. Léger received Lifetime Artistic Achievement award. Photo by James Park /Ottawa Citizen

Viola Léger, the actress who embodied La Sagouine, the endearing icon of Acadia, died Saturday at the age of 92.

Léger, who was also a teacher and former senator, died in Dieppe, New Brunswick.

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For her public and for fans of the work of author Antonine Maillet, Léger will always be “the real Sagouine,” a role she played on stage more than 3,000 times in French and in English across the country and abroad.

“She has always been one of my great friends and certainly the greatest actress Acadia has ever known,” Maillet said of Léger in a press release on Saturday.

In an interview, Maillet added that Léger had been dying for a few weeks.

“We’ve lost a person who was close to me because we had a real friendship,” Maillet said, adding that if Léger “hadn’t played Sagouine, Sagouine wouldn’t have had the success that it had, and therefore (I would not have) received the recognition I received as a writer.”

Léger withdrew from public life in February 2017, shortly after suffering a stroke that left her with lasting effects, such as memory problems and blurred vision.

Each time she entered the skin of her character as an Acadian housekeeper, “she left Viola and became La Sagouine,” said Léger’s agent, Lucienne Losier, in an interview with Presse Canadienne when Léger announced that she was retiring from acting for good.

Léger was appointed to the Senate in 2001 by Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, serving as a representative of New Brunswick. She was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1989.

Federal Minister of Official Languages Ginette Petitpas Taylor posted on social media that Acadia has never had “a more faithful ambassador than she for whom La Sagouine was not only the role of a career and a lifetime, but also represented a great symbol of pride for all Acadians.

The famous Sagouine herself, actor and former Senator, Viola Léger passed away today.

Never has Acadie had a more faithful ambassador than she for whom La Sagouine was not only the role of a career & a lifetime, but also represented a great symbol of pride for all Acadians. pic.twitter.com/A2OxJgDpvc

— Ginette Petitpas Taylor (@GinettePT) January 29, 2023

The Société Nationale de l’Acadie said Léger embodied the course of modern Acadia.

“By accepting, in 1971, the role of La Sagouine offered to her by her creator, Antonine Maillet, Viola Léger could not have suspected that she was going to take on not only a unique character, but also that she would become an icon of our people and its proud spokesperson,” Société Nationale de l’Acadie president Martin Théberge said in a statement.

The Quebec Minister of Culture, Mathieu Lacombe, also offered his condolences on Twitter, stating that Léger’s passing is a great loss “for L’Acadie and for all of us too.”

Born in 1930 to an exiled Acadian family in Massachusetts, Léger grew up mainly in New Brunswick, where she studied to become a teacher.

She was still teaching when she met Maillet, then a teacher, with whom she forged a solid friendship that would influence her professional life forever.

In 1967, when she was close to forty, Léger left for the United States to study theatre at Boston University, then flew to Paris to make her debut in theatre at the École Jacques Lecoq.

It was at that time that she received a call from Maillet, who asked if she would be interested in the role of “La Sagouine,” the character of an old Acadian housekeeper that she had just created.

Details of Léger’s funeral will be announced soon, her press secretary said.