lit a candle 4h agomy mom texted me a clip of the Les Dangereux hat seller cameo like an hour after the news broke, said this is the lady who wrote half the shows she grew up on in Quebec. never heard of her before today but 61 is nothing.
Their story
Huguette St-Denis (6 November 1964 to 3 September 2026) was a Quebec teacher, humorist, comedy writer and screenwriter whose jokes and scripts reached a generation of French-language television viewers, often without her name ever appearing on screen. She wrote for series such as Watatatow, Max Inc., Réal-TV, Les Boys, Les…
Huguette St-Denis (6 November 1964 to 3 September 2026) was a Quebec teacher, humorist, comedy writer and screenwriter whose jokes and scripts reached a generation of French-language television viewers, often without her name ever appearing on screen. She wrote for series such as Watatatow, Max Inc., Réal-TV, Les Boys, Les Parent and Bienvenue aux dames, and she co-wrote the 2002 action comedy film Les Dangereux.
Born in Montreal, she spent twelve years teaching French at the polyvalente Hyacinthe-Delorme in Saint-Hyacinthe, and also taught theatre and journalism in the region and French in Blanc-Sablon on the Lower North Shore. In 1998 her students phoned in to a radio contest to name the "coolest teacher in Quebec", and she won. The attention brought a column by Franco Nuovo and an invitation to Claire Lamarche's talk show, where she performed a parody number. That experience pushed her toward comedy writing.
She began evening classes in humour writing at the École nationale de l'humour in Montreal and, encouraged by screenwriter François Avard, left teaching to join the school's full-time writing program, graduating in April 2000. Around the same time she wrote for the humour magazine Safarir and worked with comedian François Massicotte on a Just for Laughs gala.
In June 2000, on the school's recommendation, producer and director Louis Saia hired her as a writer for the sitcom Max Inc., which went to air in 2001. That summer she also wrote comedy segments for radio station CKOI-FM. Saia brought her onto Les Boys 3, where she helped with dialogue and played a small role as a prison guard, and then handed her the script of an action comedy he had acquired. That project became Les Dangereux, which she co-wrote with Sylvain Raté and which reached cinemas in 2002. She also appears in it as a hat seller. Some of her early credits appeared under the pen name "Batstef".
Through the 2000s she worked steadily in television, writing for Watatatow, Réal-TV, Histoires de filles, Fun noir, Le Sketch Show, La Petite Séduction, Kaboum, Les Parent, Subito texto and the 2007 Les Boys series, where she also handled script editing and revision. She co-wrote the stage revues 2005 revue et corrigée and 2006 revue et corrigée at the Théâtre du Rideau Vert, and developed the comedy project Les Sansfil with Daniel Chiasson and Donald Bouthillette, whose pilot aired on Télétoon in 2009. Over her career she wrote alongside some of Quebec's best-known comedians, including Martin Matte, Laurent Paquin and Rachid Badouri.
St-Denis said she had felt from childhood that her gender identity did not match the sex assigned to her at birth, and that at fourteen she contacted the support group Aide aux trans du Québec. In 2010, while working on Bienvenue aux dames, she told her colleagues she was beginning her transition and took the name Huguette. Her colleagues were initially supportive, but in interviews through the 2010s she linked a steep drop in her contracts to her transition, and her story became part of a wider Quebec conversation about transgender people in the cultural industry. In 2016 she filed a complaint after a Saint-Hyacinthe office of the Société de l'assurance automobile du Québec repeatedly called her "Monsieur" while renewing her driver's licence, a case that drew province-wide coverage.
She kept writing and performing. In 2022 she wrote an episode of L'Œil du cyclone, "Entre nostalgie et fantôme du passé", in which she also played the character Johanne, and she joined Mike Ward and Jean-Thomas Jobin for episode 364 of the podcast Sous Écoute, a two-hour conversation that fans returned to after her death. She had also been the very first guest of Le Balado des dangereux, a podcast about the film she co-wrote, and its host became a close friend.
Huguette St-Denis was married to Sylvie St-Jean, and the couple had three children. She died on 3 September 2026 in Saint-Hyacinthe, aged 61. Her death was announced on Sunday, 6 September by Le Balado des dangereux, which remembered her big heart, her generosity and her humour. The circumstances of her death were not made public.
Biography adapted from French and English Wikipedia; Dernière Heure QC and Rose Pingouin (September 2026); Le Journal de Montréal and TVA Nouvelles (2016-2017); La Presse (2015).
In their own words
“Je voulais simplement des excuses.”
"I simply wanted an apology." On her 2016 complaint to the SAAQ, as headlined by TVA Nouvelles in January 2017.
“Moi, si on m'appelle encore « Monsieur » à la SAAQ ou si la Société recule à cause du syndicat, j'irai aux droits de la personne.”
"If they call me Monsieur again at the SAAQ, or if the agency backs down because of the union, I will go to the human rights commission." Quoted by Le Journal de Montréal after the SAAQ reversed its directive.
Photos
1Huguette St-Denis on Sous Écoute, 2022
by People Forever
same, my dad's side is from Saint Hyacinthe and he's been posting about her all morning