ER female fans can smile again: no, they did not kill Kovac after all, so we’ll get to see male perfection on the small screen some more. (Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s the obsessed teenager in me. She has to come out, once in a while.)
Last Spring, the last two episodes of ER were set in Congo, a country you don’t hear about very much on the news, at least in the U.S. As Dr. Carter said in tonight’s episode: « There is no oil here ». During the first of the two episodes set in Africa, I was surprised to hear an unknown character speak French with a strong Qu�bec accent, but then I remembered that movies and tv shows often use qu�b�cois to play the role of French characters since most people in the U.S. can’t tell the difference.
But on the following episode, the voice became a character: a medical aid named Gillian (or Julianne), played by Montreal born actress Simone-�lise Girard. A quick Google search of her name revealed that she played in Scoop and more recently in Music Hall, but it looks like she’s getting pretty active in Hollywood now.
So how on earth does a qu�b�coise nurse end up being the love interest of living god Goran Visnjic (Dr. Kovac) in an American tv sow? Curious, I paid closed attention to the show’s credits and noticed that there is a producer (which often means a writer in television) named Julie H�bert. A search on IMDB for this woman reveals that she’s a screenwriter, playwright and sometimes director in the U.S., who also writes (or used to write) for Third Watch. With a name like that, she has to be a qu�b�coise and probably wanted to give a little exposure to Qu�bec or to that specific actress, who might be her friend – LA being a small town like all the other ones…
NPR did some interviews in 2001 with LA writers, including Julie H�bert. The interview is available via RealAudio but I can’t really tell if H�bert has a Qu�bec accent or not…
So this is the joy of being a screenwriter: you can use secondary characters to play out your fantasies! And screenwriter Julie H�bert even got to see her name spelled the correct way (with the accent) in the show’s credits. Tout un exploit, madame H�bert!
