A 'love affair' with French Quebec that led to a life in radio: Jeanette Kelly dies at 70

Jeanette Kelly was as comfortable within the book-lined walls of the Quebec Literary and Historical Society —  founded in 1824 by the Earl of Dalhousie and home to Quebec City's old Anglo establishment — as she was interviewing Quebec pop singer Coeur de Pirate, actor Rémy Girard or French fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier.

She coaxed stories out of circus performers, video gamers, Quebec cultural icons like filmmakers Denys Arcand and Denis Villeneuve, and down-and-out guitar players like Lance, a homeless man she met at an art workshop at a church basement drop-in centre in downtown Montreal.

From the late 1970s, when she quit her PhD program in French literature at Université Laval to take a job as a researcher at CBC Radio in Quebec City, until her retirement as the arts reporter at CBC Montreal in 2016, Kelly made it her mission to share Quebec's rich cultural scene with English-speaking Canadians.

Kelly, 70, died Thursday in her Montreal home, her daughters Jessica, Elsa and Paule and their families at her side.

"She was really part of CBC Radio's history in this province," CBC regional manager Meredith Dellandrea said Friday on CBC Montreal's Daybreak. 

Kelly became the first host of Quebec City's afternoon radio show Breakaway in 1985.

"She was really a pioneer in bringing the richness of Quebec's francophone culture to the anglophone audience," said Barbara Uteck, the CBC executive producer who hired Kelly to host Breakaway, as well as Radio Active, a weekly program about the music Quebecers were listening to, which aired right across Canada.

The show, with its shoe-string budget, was recorded in a cramped control room in the basement of Quebec City's Auberge des Gouverneurs.

"One of my favourite memories is of sitting beside Rocky [a CBC technician] … and watching and listening as Jeanette taped Radio Active," recalls long-time producer Robert Renaud.

"It was one of those shows that CBC supported in no way, but that for Jeanette was a love affair — and her chance to share the joys of French music to English listeners from coast to coast."

"She understood to the tips of her toes what francophone Canada was all about," said David Gutnick, who worked with Kelly as a researcher on Breakaway in Quebec City in the mid-1980s. 

"She was able, as a broadcaster, to tell the stories, to convey the emotions of francophones to anglophone listeners. This was new. Anglophone Quebec was changing, opening up to their French-speaking neighbours, and Jeanette was one of the forces behind that." 

Jeanette Kelly was born in Lambeth, Ont., just outside of London, the eldest of six children. She visited Quebec for the first time on a high school trip.

"That's when she fell in love with the French language, and she just wanted to be around it," said her daughter Paule Kelly-Rhéaume.