Hartford Stage Founding Artistic Director Jacques Cartier Passes at Age 94

Hartford Stage has shared that Jacques Cartier, the well-respected theater director, educator and founder of Hartford Stage Company, passed away in December 2024 at age 94. A graduate of Yale Drama School, Cartier directed a number of successful productions in Hartford, including works by Molière, Beckett, Genet, Shakespeare, Williams, Albee, and a particularly notable production of Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Days’ Journey into Night in 1971. 

Jacques Cartier led Hartford Stage from its founding in 1963 through 1968 when he was succeeded by Paul Weidner. Cartier’s theatre company would move to its present location on Church Street in downtown Hartford in 1976 and go on to receive the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theater in 1989. After his time in Hartford, Cartier went on to freelance direct in New York, lead Center Stage in Baltimore, and serve as the head of the directing program at Boston University for over two decades. 

“It is with a heavy heart that we announce the passing of Mr. Cartier,” says Melia Bensussen, Artistic Director of Hartford Stage since 2019. “Mr. Cartier’s vision and legacy for producing award-winning, top-notch theater in Connecticut lives on. Jacques Cartier, a born storyteller, lived a storied life, from hosting various entertainment acts in his time in the Army to teaching literature before launching his successful career in the theater. There is much to be learned and admired from Mr. Cartier’s long and rich life, particularly his dedication to live theater, and we are honored to continue his legacy.” 

“After identifying Hartford as a promising spot for a new theater,” his obituary reads, “Mr. Cartier had to charm and cajole the skeptical bankers and insurance executives of the city that they deserved their own first-class theater, even going so far as to step into a moving car of one such executive to persuade him to bankroll his vision. Eventually raising close to $100,000, quite a sum at the time, Hartford Stage had its inaugural season in the spring of 1964, in a 225-seat theater converted from an old supermarket warehouse with productions of Othello, Rashomon, The Caretaker and The Country Wife and was a rousing success.” 

Cartier attributed his own passion for wanting to run a theater company to reading a book by the esteemed stage director and producer, Margo Jones (a.k.a. the “Texas Tornado”). In it, he read about the how-tos and how-nots, from budgets to season planning. The 34-year-old Cartier, then living in New Haven, shirked the idea of moving to the happening New York theater scene and found another way: “start a theater and hire yourself.”  

Jacques Cartier is survived by his wife of 66 years, Diana F. (Barry) Cartier; and his son, Nicholas Cartier, a lawyer in Washington, D.C.