She escaped an early unconsummated marriage to become an actress, first with Charles Laughton in New York and then the Comédie Française.

[1] She appeared in films by Julien Duvivier and Marcel Carné, starred as Desdemona in Orson Welles' film version of Othello (1951) and appeared in Doctor in the House (1954, the hit of the year in Britain).

They had three children, Andrea, Igor and Pavla, and Cloutier appeared in the film of his stage hit Romanoff and Juliet.

The couple divorced in 1971, when Cloutier reconnected with Orson Welles, then at work on films never finished.

Cloutier appears to have been born in Ottawa on July 10, 1923, and died of liver cancer in Montreal on December 2, 2003, aged 80.