Indicted for "rape" and "sexual assault" against a young actress - facts that the actor has always denied - Gérard Depardieu is a sacred monster of French cinema.
His career, spanning more than fifty years, is a huge range of roles, which he has played with equal fervor.
The actor's life, however, is peppered with scandals and excess.
To read also: The actor Gérard Depardieu indicted in December for alleged "rapes" in 2018
"The man is dark but the actor is immense"
, says of him Catherine Deneuve, his partner, among others, in
The Last Metro
by François Truffaut.
The actor's instinctive play and bulimia of work - more than two hundred films in cinema and television - make him one of the best known and most respected French actors in the world.
This reputation, Gérard Depardieu deserves it, he who has interpreted - with brio - most of the great heroes of national literature, from Cyrano de Bergerac to Jean Valjean des
Misérables
, including Edmond Dantès in
Le Comte de Monte-Cristo
.
A challenge all the more difficult to take up as Josée Dayan's staging for these last two films was not really conducive to performance.
To read also: Pierre Richard, Patrice Leconte, John Malkovich ... "The ogre" Depardieu told by his friends
Born on December 27, 1948 in Châteauroux, Gérard Depardieu experienced a troubled adolescence, marked by delinquency and odd jobs.
The theater, it is in Paris that he discovers it, in 1963. Two years later, he begins the cinema, then the theater and the television.
In 1974,
Bertrand Blier's
Les Valseuses
revealed it to the public.
Other roles will follow, notably in
1900
by Bernardo Bertolucci (1975), with Robert de Niro, his American alter ego,
The last metro
(1980) by François Truffaut or the successful comedies of Francis Veber like
The Goat
(1981).
To read also: Antonio de la Torre, the “Spanish Depardieu”
Serial scandals
In the early 1990s, Depardieu tried his hand at Hollywood cinema -
Green Card
in 1990 and
1492
in 1992 - and became “Dipardiou”.
Green Card earned him, in January 1991, a Golden Globe for best comedy actor.
But his American career came to a halt after the publication, in February 1991, of an interview with The
Times
, conducted in French, in which the actor explained that he had witnessed a rape at the age of nine.
The magazine will write "participate" and not "observe", which will cause an uproar in the United States.
Marked by several “flops”, the end of the 1990s and the 2000s also saw the actor play in successful films, such as the
Asterix and Obelix series
and
36, quai des Orfèvres
.
In 2014, after having hit the headlines in
Welcome to New York
, inspired by the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair, he returned by the front door to the Cannes Film Festival, in 2015, with
Valley of Love
by Guillaume Nicloux.
Read also: Asterix and Obelix: discover the first sheet of the new album in exclusivity
In the city, Gérard Depardieu recognized four children, two of his first wife, Elisabeth, the actors Julie and Guillaume, who died in 2008, as well as Roxane and Jean, born from two other relationships.
Her passionate relationship with Carole Bouquet hit the headlines for more than ten years.
Known for his taste for good food and his passion for the vine - he owns vineyards in France and abroad and has invested in restaurants in Paris - Gérard Depardieu is also illustrated by his outrageous behavior, some of which led to scandals making him a regular in the news section: in 2005, he knocks out a paparazzi in Florence, urinates in the cabin of a Paris-Dublin flight in 2011, hits a motorist in the middle of Paris in 2012.
To read also: Gérard Depardieu: "This undeniable taste for art that we have in common with Pierre Cardin"
Russian period
At the end of 2012, he once again made the headlines by announcing that he
"returned"
his passport to protest against the taxation of the richest.
After opting for tax exile in Belgium, he finally acquired Russian citizenship.
“I find it normal to pay, but not to idiots who think they are doing good,”
he declared in 2014 to
Point
.
To read also: Depardieu: "I love Putin, Russia and its democracy"
From then on, Gérard Depardieu continues to praise his new homeland, Russia, a
“great democracy”
, and does not stop praising Vladimir Poutine, whom he compared to Pope John Paul II ... or to himself.
In
Monster
, a book of black and bitter confidences published in the fall of 2017, the actor returns to his so-called disenchantment with France, saying he prefers
"to be free than French"
.
"But this does not mean that I renounce this country"
, he adds immediately.
At the beginning of February, while he was promoting his latest book
Ailleurs
on France 5,
published in October 2020 and at the top of Amazon France sales since Tuesday evening, he loses his temper in the face of Claire Chazal who asks him about human rights in Russia and Vladimir Putin.
"Ah because you think he's a Hitler?" He
did what? Burnt offerings? ”
, he got angry, before adding:
"I never get involved in politics when I am in a foreign country"
.