Gerard Depardieu Biography

Depardieu’s impoverished beginnings may have been a contributing factor to his later success. Born the third of six children in Chateauroux, 106 miles south of Paris, to a disillusioned mother and a father who was an illiterate sheet metal worker and alcoholic, Depardieu dropped out of school and ran away from home at the age of 12.

Hitchhiking around Europe, he earned money as a door-to-door soap salesman and as a beach boy in the South of France, as well as getting involved in car theft and the black market.

After several brushes with the law and a brief spell in prison, things took a turn for the better when a friend encouraged the young Gerard to audition for the Theatre Nationale Populaire in Paris. Once he had overcome a stammer, Depardieu excelled, training alongside future co-stars Patrick Dewaere and Miou-Miou. In 1965, he made his film debut in the ‘Le Beatnik et le minet’, after which he quickly became a familiar face on French TV.

By the early 1970s, Depardieu had co-starred in 11 French films, but his big break was to come in 1974, when he was given the part of an incompetent thug in director Bertrand Blier’s Les Valseuses’/‘Going Places’. After this success, he went on to star alongside popular French actress Isabelle Adjani in ‘Barocco’, followed by the role of a passionate Communist agitator in ‘1900’, before teaming up with Blier once again in the Oscar-winning ‘Preparez vos mouchoirs’/‘Get Out Your Handkerchiefs’.

Starting the 1980s with a bang, Depardieu won France’s prestigious César award for his portrayal of a resistance fighter in ‘Le Dernier métro’/‘The Last Metro’. More rave reviews followed when he played the part of a 16-century peasant whose identity is in question in ‘Le Retour de Martin Guerre’/‘The Return of Martin Guerre’ in 1982. The same year saw him shine in the title role of ‘Danton’, set in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

Depardieu made the switch from actor to co-director in 1984, with ‘Le Tartuffe’. A stellar performance as a tough cop in ‘Police’ came next, snaring him the Best Male Performance award at the 1985 Venice Film Festival, before he landed the career-changing role of a naïve farmer in the classic ‘Jean de Florette’. Suddenly, the name Gerard Depardieu was recognised around the world.

The actor sealed the approval of fans and critics alike in the title role of ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’, a box-office smash in 1990, for which he won a Best Actor Oscar nomination. The film, which scooped nine Césars, including Depardieu’s Best Actor, and a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, also earned him the 1990 Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Male Performance.

Making the move into English-language acting, Depardieu starred alongside Andie MacDowell in the 1990 romantic comedy ‘Green Card’, playing a French musician who agrees to a marriage of convenience. The following year he shared the role of 17th-century composer Marin Marais with his son Guillaume in the biopic ‘Tous les matins du monde’/‘All The Mornings of the World’. Throughout the rest of the Nineties, Depardieu remained in high demand. Despite the limited success of an English remake of the 1991 hit ‘Mon Père, ce heros’, as ‘My Father, The Hero’, and being miscast as Christopher Columbus in ‘1492: Conquest of Paradise’, performances in the epic ‘Germinal’, in Claude Berri’s ‘Colonel Chabert’, in ‘Les Misérables’, ‘Balzac’ and a TV adaptation of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’, to name but a few, kept his legion of fans happy.

Another directing credit came in 1999, with the semi-autobiographical ‘Un Pont entre deux rives’/‘The Bridge’, and in the same year Depardieu took on the role of Obelix in the live-action remake of the comic books ‘Asterix et Obelix contre Cesar’. This was followed, a year later, with a light-hearted portrayal of a flamboyant designer in the family film ‘102 Dalmatians’.

Having survived two near-fatal accidents (a plane collision in 1996 and a motorbike accident in 1998) and major heart surgery in July 2000, Depardieu went from strength to strength in the first few years of the new millennium, appearing in, among others, ‘Love, Prozac and Other Curiosities’, Roman Coppola’s ‘CQ’, ‘Between Strangers’, in which he acted opposite Sophia Loren, the Matt Dillon-directed ‘City of God’, ‘Bon Voyage’, and ‘Tais-Toi’/‘Shut Up’.

Depardieu is divorced from Elisabeth Guignot, who he appeared alongside in ‘Jean de Florette’ and who is the mother of his two grown-up children, Julie and Guillaume. He also has a daughter, Roxanne, reportedly born to model Karine Sylla. The actor has a famously rocky relationship with his son, officially cutting off contact with him in 2003 after Guillame threatened him with a gun, which led to a suspended jail sentence. Depardieu has had a long-standing relationship with the actress Carole Bouqet, with whom he opened the Parisian restaurant La Fontaine Gaillon in 2003.

As well as two restaurants, the actor maintains an eclectic mix of business interests, including a vineyard in the Loire, Romanian textiles businesses and Cuban oil wells. He has also written a cookbook and ventured into international politics. In 2005, at the age of 56, Depardieu announced his intention to retire from screen acting following his starring role in ‘Michou d’Auber’, claiming that he had nothing left to prove. He has since gone back on this decision, maintaining his prolific output with roles in several feature films, some of them still currently in production.