Guess I'm late to the party ... Congratulations! - Matching china is in the mail!
As a Canadian, I found the interview very interesting!
I now also realize I've been mispronouncing 'Boyer' in my head all this time!
Welcome Back!
Kruser
As a Canadian by heritage, I know what you mean. My mother is
Québécoise and a naturalized American citizen, while I also still have relatives in the province as well as some who moved to America but retained their citizenship, opting instead to become resident aliens. Our beloved club president and my friend, Lee Asher, is an American by birth and a Torontonian by residence as well as a Canadian resident alien.
Regarding the last name, most people in North America pronounce it the Anglicized way but it is French in origin, so I use the French pronunciation. My father's father's father was a Frenchman who did some traveling - he emigrated to Ireland, met and married a native citizen there, then continued through Canada and eventually arrived in the US, settling in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York.
I'm actually the only one of my siblings that uses the French pronunciation - I adopted it when I started learning Japanese in college in my late twenties! The French sound of the name translates better into Japanese than the English one does. When I moved on to practicing a Japanese martial art, I took to labeling my uniform and practice weapons with my name in Japanese using the French pronunciation, printed in the
katakana syllabary (katakana is used in Japanese for onomatopoeia [printed versions of sound effects], some loan words from foreign languages that lack a Japanese equivalent and foreign names and proper nouns). I even had introduction cards printed with my name in "French Japanese" for handing out to fellow martial artists at seminars and when visiting other schools. I liked the pronunciation so I've kept it all this time.
My mother's family, being native French speakers from birth, always used that pronunciation, so it sounds natural to my ear. I never learned French as a child because my parents divorced when I was five - my father forbade my mother from teaching my brothers and me French because he couldn't speak it, didn't want to learn it and didn't want us to be able to carry on conversations he couldn't understand.
There's a certain irony in the fact that my father was mistaken for a famous French celebrity once. He married in the early 1960s and shared the same name as the actor Charles Boyer, who was still a well-known name in the French-speaking part of the world at the time, as well as to a lesser extent in the English-speaking part. My parents honeymooned in Niagara Falls on the Canadian side of the border - to this day, the American side is still largely undeveloped parkland while the Canadian side has long had nice hotels and entertainment, even before the two casinos there opened in the 1990s and 2000s. Not long after checking in, my dad got a phone call in French from a local radio station - he put my mother on to speak to them. It turns out that when he checked in, someone noticed the famous name in the register and tipped them off, prompting a phone call from the hotel desk to the radio station, which I'm sure was especially interested seeing that the "actor" checked in as a honeymooner with someone other than his known wife!
Interesting side notes about the real actor - he married a British actress in 1934, became a naturalized American in 1942, had a son in '43, lost his son to suicide in '65, lost his wife to cancer in '78 and took his own life two days later, which was also two days before his 79th birthday. He was still active in movies, having filmed his last role in
A Matter of Time,, released two year earlier. But kids today probably know him more for an animated character that was modeled after one of his film roles, the one that launched his career. In 1938, his breakthrough role was in a film called
Algiers, in which he played Pepe le Moko, a desert-dwelling thief opposite Hedy Lamarr - a famous mis-quote of the character is "Come with me to the Casbah!," which became a popular line of the Chuck Jones character Pepé Le Pew, who in turn was based on Boyer's character. Boyer also earned the nickname "the last of the cinema's great lovers," for continuing to have a successful film career well into his twilight years, longer than most romantic lead actors of his heyday.
(Wow, one little comment and I write a novel about it...)