Michael Sarrazin should have been Joe Buck. The role in *Midnight Cowboy* had been his—he was cast, measured for costumes, and ready to head to Texas—when it slipped away in a tangle of studio politics. Universal, which controlled his contract under the dying studio system, refused to release him for the film. Jon Voight took the part instead and became a star.
It was one of the most agonizing losses of Sarrazin’s career, but it did not define him. The truth is more complex. He was the right actor for a particular season in cinema—a season of drifters, dropouts, and soft-spoken searchers who looked like they wandered in off the highway and never quite returned. Sarrazin started far from Hollywood, both geographically and culturally.
Born Jacques Michel André Sarrazin in Quebec City in May 1940 and raised in Montreal, he was the son of a prosecuting lawyer and grew up speaking French. He was a middle child who tried eight schools and lost interest in all of them. Performing, however, was in him from the start. “I’ve always craved recognition and attention,” he later said.
“I never seemed to get enough of them as a kid. ” At 17, he left school for good, joined the Montreal branch of the New York Actor Studio, and was cut off by his family for doing so. He survived by washing dishes and selling toys, living in an attic above a store in Montreal’s bohemian district. “The beginning was very tough,” he said.
He scavenged the streets for discarded junk to sell for beer money. A brief detour to New York ended with deportation after he overstayed his visa. Back in Canada, he borrowed $50, moved to Toronto, and began landing work in radio, television, and film. Hollywood noticed him, and Universal offered a contract worth $50,000 a year.
He arrived in California with a gangly frame, a shy smile, and a gaze that could turn oblique on command. The early jobs were forgettable. “They ground out *The Virginian*, *The Doomsday Flight*,” he recalled. “It took them 15 days to toss together a movie I was in, *Gunfight at Abilene*, and it was so bad they couldn’t release it.
”
In 1967, he played the young protégé to George C. Scott’s con man in *The Flim-Flam Man*. Scott, known for being difficult, took a shine to him. “He was exceptionally generous with me,” Sarrazin said.
“For some reason, he took me under his wing. ” Sarrazin himself called the film “dumb and juvenile. ”
A year later, he co-starred with Jacqueline Bisset in *The Sweet Ride*, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination and changed his life privately. He and Bisset began a relationship that lasted into the mid-1970s.
They lived together in a ramshackle beach house in Malibu, where he filled the walls with books on movie history and an “ego board” of his positive reviews. In 1969, he found his signature role in Sydney Pollack’s *They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? * As Robert Syverton, he became Jane Fonda’s partner in a Depression-era dance marathon, lending her stubborn rage a counterweight of quiet resolve. Pollack pushed for authenticity.
“We should work until signs of exhaustion,” he told the cast. “Fights would break out among the men. Women started crying. ”
The film received nine Oscar nominations.
Gig Young won for Best Supporting Actor. Fonda and Susannah York were recognized. Sarrazin was not. He believed a six-minute monologue explaining his character’s final act might have secured a nomination had it not been cut from the final film.
He didn’t dwell on it. “You could have paid me a dollar a week to work on that,” he said. “It hits you bolt upright. I still get really intense when I watch it.
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Then came the Midnight Cowboy disappointment. His brother Pierre later said, “It was a very disappointing moment for him because the movie was wonderful. ” Voight was always gracious, acknowledging how close Sarrazin had come. Sarrazin kept working.
Paul Newman cast him in *Sometimes a Great Notion*, where he played the idealistic younger brother in a logging family. He starred in *The Pursuit of Happiness* as a college student charged after a fatal accident. Yet he never quite broke into the highest rank of stardom. Part of that was by design.
He refused almost all interviews and never appeared on a TV talk show. When he did speak, he was often ornery. “It bugs the hell out of me when I’m typecast as another Jimmy Dean or young Fonda or Brando,” he said in 1968. “All I want is to be me, Michael Sarrazin.
Take me on my own terms or cut me out. ”
He reunited with Bisset in 1971 for *Believe in Me*, a dark romance about drug addiction. He appeared in John Huston’s *The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean* alongside Newman, Anthony Perkins, and Ava Gardner. In 1973, he played the creature in *Frankenstein: The True Story* as a beautiful man first, then ruined—an interpretation critics took seriously.
His relationship with Bisset ended in the mid-1970s. She was deeply in love, according to gossip columnist Dorothy Manners. “She was far more involved with him than she was in her own career,” Manners said. “Mike came across as a loner, an intellectual hippie type, and something of a male chauvinist.
” Sarrazin later spoke with eyes downcast: “She deserves happiness and all this wonderful success she is having. ” Of his own career, he said, “I jog a little, but mostly I fret. I drive my agent crazy. I watch my old movies on TV and see all the mistakes I made.
I cry a lot. I’m a mess until I start to work again. ”
The 1970s pulled him in multiple directions. He took roles in *Lipstick*, a controversial rape-revenge drama, and *The Gumball Rally*, a cult comedy about an illegal coast-to-coast race.
He worked in Iran on *Caravans* before the revolution. The projects varied wildly, but he remained professional throughout. The paradox hardened: he was everywhere and somehow nowhere. The industry that had welcomed introspective outsiders turned to spectacle and high-concept blockbusters.
Sarrazin didn’t vanish—he slid away. He worked in television miniseries, Canadian thrillers, and American programmers. He hosted *Saturday Night Live* in 1978, performing a popular hockey skit with fellow Canadian Dan Aykroyd. It led nowhere.
Reviewers could be cruel, but their cruelty often had less to do with him than with a system that misuses particular talents. “It was hard for him to play depth when the surface is all the script wants,” the narrator of this retrospective observes. Yet he never became a walking disaster. There were no arrests, no rehab confessions, no dramatic crashes.
In the early 1990s, his brother Pierre coaxed him back into French-language film for *La Florida*, a comedy about a Montreal family running a motel in Florida. He sold his California property and returned to Montreal permanently. He continued working—an appearance on *Star Trek: Deep Space Nine* in 1996, episodes of *Murder, She Wrote*, and a 2008 television film called *The Christmas Choir*. He accepted a small part in Walter Salles’ adaptation of *On the Road*, a cameo that doubled as a private joke about drifters.
In his final years, he fought a quiet battle with mesothelioma, a cancer likely caused by asbestos in his working environments. His daughter Catherine remembered him using his walker and wheelchair as props for skits, bringing comedy to his own indignities for an audience of two. He died in Montreal in April 2011 at age 70, with his daughters present and his brother nearby. Obituaries reached for logic to explain why he had not become a bigger star.
The honest answer is that stardom is a formula with more variables than talent and will. He had the talent and the will. The rest depended on timing, taste, champions, and luck. There is a way to tell his story that makes it sound like a tragedy.
That way is wrong. He worked with giants and did not embarrass himself. He was cast in one of the era’s most pitiless masterpieces and gave it the exact weight it needed. *On the Road* premiered in 2012 with his cameo intact.
The actor who embodied the American drifter in a career that both opened doors and blocked exits appeared one last time inside the story that taught a generation how to dream.