Alys Robi
Alys Robi was born Alys Robitaille in Saint-Sauveur, a neighborhood of Quebec City in Canada. Her strong-minded father was a semi-professional boxer and volunteer firefighter, and the language in her home and neighborhood was French, as it is in much of Quebec. At the age of 4, she appeared in a vaudeville show, performing as La Petite Alice. By the time she was 12 she was a well-known child performer and singer in her hometown, and she set off on her own for Montreal, where she was taken under the wing of Rose Ouellette, a comedienne of Canadian fame.
In Montreal, she learned acting and singing, on stage and on the radio. By the 1940s she was involved romantically with Louis Agostini, a Toronto musician who conducted the orchestra for a variety show at a radio station in Montreal. Agostini landed her a recording contract, and she was soon known beyond Montreal, appearing in New York clubs during the 1940s and on Canadian stages, clubs, and radio programs. After World War II, she appeared in London in live performances and on the new medium of television on the BBC.
In 1948 she was ready to appear in a motion picture and was traveling to Hollywood when she was involved in an automobile accident. After recovering from her physical injuries she began to exhibit mood swings and eventually severe depression. Back in Quebec to recover, she was repeatedly misdiagnosed and eventually institutionalized for her depression and other mental health issues. While in the mental health asylum in Quebec, where she was sent in 1952, she underwent a lobotomy. The operation was done at the behest of her father, without her consent.
In the case of Alys Robi, the operation was successful, and she found herself both feeling better and without any perceptible impairment as a result of the procedure. Leaving the asylum the same year she attempted to revive her career. But her previous mental health issues stood in her way. During the 1950s the issues of mental health and being institutionalized carried a stigma which went beyond social issues, and Alys found difficulty obtaining work. In one of her autobiographies (she wrote two) she wrote, “In those days if you were mentally ill, they locked you up until you died, then they buried you in unconsecrated ground out behind the asylum.”
Refusing to give up, Alys performed as a parody of herself, combining her old vaudeville training with her singing style. Eventually, she did make a comeback in the 1990s, with an international hit song, and several books, articles and films about her life. For the rest of her life after her lobotomy, she worked with former psychiatric patients who had been institutionalized during their care. In 1985 she was made a Grand Dame of the Royal Order of Malta for her work with psychiatric patients. She died in 2011 at the age of 88.