Xavier Dolan-Tadros CQ CM (French: [ɡzavje dɔlan tadʁɔs];[1] born 20 March 1989) is a Canadian filmmaker and actor.

[4] He is the son of Geneviève Dolan, a Québécois public college administrator with Irish roots,[4] and Manuel Tadros, an Egyptian-Canadian actor and singer of Coptic and Lebanese descent.

[8] He began acting at the age of 4, after his aunt, a production manager, suggested he auditioned for a minor role in a TV drama.

[10] He kept working until he was 8, when his mother, unable to cope with such a hyperactive child, sent him to boarding school in rural Quebec for 5 years.

[7][11][9] His extensive dubbing career also started to intensify at this time, as Dolan found it hard to audition and get acting jobs.

[12][13] Once he completed his high school education, he decided to enroll at the College de Maisonneuve studying literature, but he will only last two months, later describing the experience as "suffocating".

Remembering his early days as an actor preceding his filmmaking debut, Dolan said:The director of a film I made when I was seven noticed I asked a lot of questions about everything.

[15]Dolan attracted international attention with his directorial debut—a film about the complicated relationship between a mother and her teenage son—which he wrote, directed, produced and starred in at the age of 19.

[16] Talking about the genesis of the film, actress Anne Dorval, who starred as the titular mother and will later work on numerous projects with him, stated Dolan was only 15 when he first came to see her at her dubbing studio.

But making that film, for me, was such an effort of modesty in terms of accepting what a brash, hysterical, egotistical kid I could have been and embracing the fact that I needed to be honest so the movie wouldn't be one-dimensional.

Brunette also called the film "funny and audacious", while Allan Hunter of Screen International said that it possessed "the sting of shrewdly observed truth".

[34] It received its world premiere in the main competition section at the 70th Venice International Film Festival on 2 September 2013, and won the FIPRESCI award.

[40] Dolan's next film was an adaptation of the play Juste la fin du monde by Jean-Luc Lagarce, titled It's Only the End of the World.

The film stars Marion Cotillard, Gaspard Ulliel, Vincent Cassel, Léa Seydoux and Nathalie Baye.

"[46][47][48] The Hollywood Reporter called it "a cold and deeply unsatisfying" film[49] and Variety dubbed it "a frequently excruciating dramatic experience".

[51][52] The film also received positive reviews from critics, including The Guardian, which called it a "brilliant, stylised and hallucinatory evocation of family dysfunction".

[53] It's Only the End of the World was a box office hit in France,[54] where it debuted at number one and sold over 1 million tickets.

In March 2013, Dolan was in pre-production for his first English-language film The Death & Life of John F. Donovan;[58] he co-wrote the screenplay with Jacob Tierney.

[60] Speaking to Telerama, he mentioned the many issues faced during and after filming:For the first time, everything was painful and problematic from start to finish, from funding to post-production, and beyond.

It would be inelegant to name precisely the people who were problematic, and I am finally proud of the end result, but we had to make very difficult choices.

By switching to a large budget, a fragmented shooting, in English and on two continents, I had to face my own ignorance, inexperience, incompetence.

[66] In a more positive review, Screen International wrote that the film "may revisit a lot of familiar territory for Dolan but on this form it is good to welcome him home.

"[67] Dolan's eighth feature film, titled Matthias & Maxime, centers on the titular Matthias (played by Gabriel D'Almeida Freitas) and Maxime (played by Dolan himself), lifelong friends whose relationship is tested when they act in a short film whose script calls for them to kiss, leaving them both questioning their sexual identities when the experience awakens their long-dormant feelings for each other.

[69][70] It received mixed to generally positive reviews, with The Hollywood Reporter calling it a movie "miming an emotion that's never actually felt"[71] while Variety noted that "it feels at once younger and older, sweeter and more seasoned, than Dolan's last few films".

He also discussed his fears of a "civil war caused by intolerance" and went on to say, "I don't understand what is the point of telling stories when everything around us is falling apart.

[79][non-primary source needed] In 2015, Dolan was selected to serve on the jury for the main competition section of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.

[88][non-primary source needed] When asked how he got the part, he said he had met director Muschietti and told him he'd play any role to be in the sequel, "the door knob, the curtain".

[90] In December 2021, Dolan confirmed via Instagram the end of the shooting of his first TV Drama, The Night Logan Woke Up, based on Michel Marc Bouchard's play of the same name.

[99] It includes several works from the 2000s, such as Million Dollar Baby and Mystic River by Clint Eastwood, There Will Be Blood by Paul Thomas Anderson, Catch Me If You Can by Steven Spielberg and The Departed by Martin Scorsese.

DVDs may be labelled VQ for "version Québécoise", which uses a Québécois accent and terms unique to that variety of the French language, or VFQ for "version francophone québécoise", which presents a generally neutral accent but pronounces English words in a way found in North America rather than in France.