Gerard Depardieu, as flawed as he is flamboyant, rose from poverty to personify an unabashed Frenchness, but the love affair soured
- An actor of sublime sensitivity, Depardieu never smoothed the rough edges that marked his early life as a rent boy, grave robber and, as he himself said, a thug
- His talent is such that he has always been forgiven for his misdeeds off screen, but that may change now French police are investigating him for rape
Gerard Depardieu’s giant frame may have ballooned over the years, with his love of food and drink overshadowing his art, but until now the French actor’s outrageous talent has always ensured he would be forgiven – even as he cosied up to Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Darkness has never been far from the actor whose sublime sensitivity in such international hits as Jean de Florette and Cyrano de Bergerac made him one of cinema’s greats. In Depardieu the brute and the poet sit uneasily together and are what make him so magnetic on screen.
The man who would come to personify a certain type of unabashed, expansive Frenchness grew up in extreme poverty, the son of an illiterate, alcoholic metal worker father. He was the third of six children. Depardieu said his mother told him she had tried to abort him using knitting needles. They couldn’t afford another baby.
By his own account, he mixed with bad company, hanging out with prostitutes before working as a rent boy and committing various crimes, including grave robbing.
At 16 he landed in jail for stealing a car and at 20 “the thug in me was alive and well”, he wrote in his 2014 autobiography. Acting proved a salvation. He started on stage in Paris in 1965 and his breakout film came nearly a decade later, playing a ruffian in the erotic comedy Les Valseuses (Going Places).
If I hadn’t been an actor, I’d happily be a pastry chef or a butcher
Money, he has never been embarrassed to admit, was the motivating factor in him first becoming an actor. “That may sound vulgar but that’s how it is,” he said in 2015.
Depardieu’s star rose in Hollywood with the Oscar-nominated Green Card, in which he and Andie McDowell tried to cheat US immigration with an arranged marriage and then fell in love.