I studied French in high school, and one summer I went to France with a group. While we were watching Jéopardie in the hotel room, one of the contestants chose Acteurs for 100 (francs), and one of my roommates — without skipping a beat — said, «Qui est Gérard Depardieu?»
Depardieu has survived 17 (at the last count) motorbike accidents, a quintuple heart bypass and a runway accident when his small plane smacked into a Boeing 727 at Madrid airport. He’s also seen through a poverty-ravished childhood, a short spell in jail for theft and a 26-year marriage. Little wonder the French call him “une force de la nature”. Dressed today in a navy suit and pale-blue shirt, the buttons straining at his considerable girth, not even a hurricane would blow him over. “I am a killer of life,” he tells me, “but I’ve never used my bullets!” No, I’m not really sure what he means either. But it sounds good.
When we meet, he is sitting in the boardroom of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Berlin. A beleaguered-looking interpreter is by his side. If Depardieu is wary of the media, he’s just as cautious of those employed to put his words into English. Back when he was nominated for an Oscar for Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), perhaps the only time a character’s nose has outflanked his own bulbous protrusion, he looked to be the favourite, until an article in Time alleged the actor might have “participated in” a rape while young. In fact, it should have said he “witnessed” one. By the time the slapdash translation was corrected, the damage was done — and he’d lost to Reversal of Fortune’s Jeremy Irons.
While he allows his (word-perfect) bilingual minion to bring his first couple of answers to life, he then switches to his own inimitable English, mixing and matching verbs like ingredients in a rustic dish. “I understand much better than I speak,” he says, a phrase that doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence. Still, he’s entirely able to articulate his bile for Hollywood movies. “I refused more than I did,” he spits. “In Hollywood, you still have wonderful actors but it’s so hard to work there. To work becomes a Kafka nightmare — it’s the last communist country!”
His sojourns in Los Angeles have been rare — 1990 rom-com Green Card was a high point, but the likes of 102 Dalmatians (2000) and Last Holiday (2006) were not. But his work rate in Europe is ferocious; more than 180 film and TV credits since he began in 1970. That’s four-and-a-half films a year for four decades. Cameos. Support. Top-billing. When you’re the most famous man in French cinema, size really doesn’t matter. “It’s the people you work with [that matter],” he explains. “It’s not the role. I don’t give a shit about the role. I don’t have any ambition or career plans.”
It seems strange for a man who met the Pope, lunched with Princess Diana and calls Fidel Castro a close friend to claim he has no ambition. “I never have,” he protests. “I’m living in the present. I have no ambition. It’s true. But I want to live. I’m curious about people. That’s what I’ve always done since I’ve been a small boy. I’m curious about others. I do this profession. I’m an actor. And it is, for me, an opportunity to meet people. One of the advantages of my profession is I come into contact with many people.”
But acting is just one part of the Depardieu portfolio. Quite apart from the investments in Cuban oil fields (hence the Castro connection) and Romanian telecommunication and textiles industries, most famously he’s a producer of wine, purchasing in 1989 the 13th-century Château de Tigné estate in Anjou, in the lower Loire valley of western France, which now annually produces 12 cuvées — 350,000 bottles. He’s since expanded globally, co-owning a series of tiny estates in Argentina, Italy, Algeria, Morocco and Bordeaux with wine mogul Bernard Magrez. “I’m not passionate about wine-making,” he stresses. “I’m passionate about the country. I know the people who grow my grapes.”
His mobile rings and he briefly interrupts the conversation to answer. Apparently, he runs so many businesses, he’s had pockets sewn into his period-movie costumes to house his various phones. He also owns the restaurant Le Fontaine Gaillon, nestled in the heart of the Opéra district of Paris. “I take care of the restaurant and also the people who come to the restaurant,” he says. “So when you have a restaurant, if you want to make a good cook, you have to take care of the food. How it tastes, the clarity of everything. The meat, food, fish, birds, how they grew up, who takes care of that, so that makes you alive. And that means communication with the people who are passionate about that.”
Despite these entrepreneurial activities, he’s still entranced by film. Of his two new efforts, the tragi-comedy Mammuth is the one he clearly holds dear. Looking like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, with his long, blond locks, Depardieu plays Serge, an abattoir worker on the verge of retirement. When his wife discovers that he won’t get his full pension due to some iffy paperwork, he takes off on his Mammut motorbike on a journey into his past to uncover some vital missing documents. “My father lived just like the man in the film,” says the actor. “He was exploited by everyone and he never went in search of his pension. In fact, both my parents died too soon for that. But it is the poetry of their lives that we’re looking at here.”
Poetry: it’s an interesting choice of word. Depardieu was born the third of six children in Châteauroux, 160 miles south of Paris. His father, Dédé, was an illiterate, alcohol-dependent sheet metal worker; his mother, Lilette, so crushed by poverty, once let slip that she considered aborting young Gérard with a knitting needle. Not much poetry there, you might say. The family was so poor that they could rarely afford even the cheapest meat, but Depardieu likes to put a romantic spin on his youth. “At Christmas, we had maybe one orange,” he wrote in his foody tome My Cookbook, “but I had my freedom.”
He left home at 12, so the story goes, to live with a pair of ageing but apparently hospitable prostitutes who worked the US army base on the other side of town, before hitting the road in his mid-teens. Hustling hand-to-mouth, even selling stolen booze, he eventually wound up in Paris where he enrolled in an acting school. It’s why he’s so wrapped up in his Mammuth character. “I’m almost a vagabond myself,” he says. “I’m an absolute spectator of life, so I’m very like this man. I’m luckier than him because I have a job where I earn a lot of money. But there is also a lot of silliness and stupidity surrounding my job — like the effect that money has on people.”
He says the film reminded him of his early days as an actor, after he graduated from the Théâtre Nationale Populaire (having overcome a damaging stammer). “It was fun to make a film as one used to make them — like Les Valseuses,” he says. “Although even that was too organised for me! We were organised making this film, of course, but there was a lot of freedom. We felt free. It’s bit of a change at least, from all the stinky boring films.” Depardieu’s 1974 breakthrough, Les Valseuses cast him as a young thug prone to car theft and GBH; a role many thought was autobiographical, it almost seems like a precursor to Mammuth.
Yet another significance is that the film is dedicated to his son Guillaume, the product of his long marriage to actress Elisabeth Guignot, with whom he starred in Jean de Florette. Guillaume died two-and-a-half years ago — aged 37 — after contracting viral pneumonia on location in Romania. It was a tragic end to a tormented life, one that seemed to take his father’s wayward youth and shade it much darker. Caught robbing a phone box at 16, Guillaume graduated to more serious crimes — from drink-driving to dealing heroin, which saw him serve three months of a one-year sentence. Worse was to come: a motorbike accident led to 17 operations to repair his damaged knee. During one, he contracted a bacterial infection that caused so much pain he eventually chose to have his leg amputated.
