[1] Born and raised in Saint-Hyacinthe,[1] Lamothe served in the Canadian Army during World War II, beginning his career in music by performing as "The Singing Sergeant" for his fellow soldiers.
[1] Through the 1970s he performed as an actor in a number of films, most notably We Are Far from the Sun (On est loin du soleil), The True Nature of Bernadette (La Vraie nature de Bernadette), The Doves (Les Colombes) and The Death of a Lumberjack (La Mort d'un bûcheron), and won the Canadian Film Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1973 for the latter role.
[5] During the same era, he was host of a television variety show, Le Ranch à Willie, for Télé-Métropole, and the subject of a documentary film, Je chante à cheval... avec Willie Lamothe, for the National Film Board.
[1] He suffered a stroke while performing in Rimouski in 1978,[6] and made only irregular appearances afterward, most notably in a CBC Television series about the history of Canadian country music in the 1990s.
[7] His son Michel (1948-2019), also sometimes credited as "Willie Lamothe, Jr.", was a rock musician who was associated with the bands Offenbach and Corbeau.