Non English characters not recognized

I have contacts names and addresses in MySQL database. I connect to LO Writer, Calc or Base with ODBC. Tables open in LO but all non English characters are replaced by question marks. When I select the data source, I specify Unicode UTF-8 character set. I tried several other character sets, no success. My database collation is UTF8_general_ci
This problem does not appear in MS Office Word or Excel. Data from same MySQL database connected with ODBC show all special characters OK (especially in French and German).
What did I miss?