Gérard Depardieu
Gérard Xavier Marcel Depardieu is a French actor. Considered an icon of French cinema in the same way as Jean Gabin and Alain Delon, he has completed over 200 films since 1967, most of which as a lead actor. Depardieu has worked with over 150 film directors including François Truffaut, Bertrand Blier, Maurice Pialat, Alain Resnais, Claude Chabrol, Ridley Scott, Peter Weir, Jean-Luc Godard, and Bernardo Bertolucci. He is the second highest-grossing actor in the history of French cinema behind Louis de Funès. Among his films, about 60 have sold more than one million tickets in France. He has portrayed numerous historical and fictitious figures including Cyrano de Bergerac, Georges Danton, Christopher Columbus, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Auguste Rodin, Jean Valjean, Edmond Dantès, Porthos, commissioner Maigret, Joseph Stalin and Grigori Rasputin, as well as Obelix in four of the live action Asterix films. Depardieu is also a film producer, businessman and vineyard owner. He has occasionally directed films and performed as a singer. His body of work includes many television productions, several records and, as of 2025, 19 stage plays and 9 books.
Growing up in poverty in Châteauroux, central France, Depardieu had a difficult youth before settling in Paris where he became an actor. In 1974, he had his breakthrough role in Going Places, becoming an overnight star. Depardieu quickly established himself as a leading actor in European cinema and proved himself a versatile performer by appearing in a wide variety of productions, including drama, comedy, crime and avant-garde films. He has received acclaim for his performances in The Last Metro, for which he won the César Award for Best Actor, in Police, for which he won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor, Jean de Florette, and Cyrano de Bergerac, for which he won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival and his second César Award for Best Actor as well as garnering a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. He started a Hollywood career with Green Card, winning a Golden Globe Award, and later appeared in several big-budget English-language films, including 1492: Conquest of Paradise, The Man in the Iron Mask, and Life of Pi.
Depardieu is a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur and Chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite. He was granted citizenship of Russia in January 2013, and became a cultural ambassador of Montenegro during the same month. During the early 2010s, his tax exile in Russia and his support of Vladimir Putin caused controversy in France.
Depardieu was accused of sexual misconduct as early as the 1990s, though this did not develop into formal complaints until the late 2010s. In December 2020, French authorities charged him with rape. Depardieu denied any wrongdoing but a number of controversies since 2020, not limited to the accusations of rape, damaged his popularity in France and abroad, resulting in his being stripped in 2023 of the National Order of Quebec. In May 2025, he was convicted of sexual assault against two women in a separate case. He has appealed against his sentencing.
Early life
Gérard Xavier Marcel Depardieu was born on 27 December 1948 in Châteauroux, Indre, France, to a working-class family. He is the third of six children of Anne Jeanne Josèphe, a stay-at-home mother known as "La Lilette", and René Maxime Lionel Depardieu, a metal worker and volunteer fireman. Not wishing to have a child at the time, Depardieu's mother tried unsuccessfully to abort him.Depardieu grew up in poverty in a two-room apartment at 39 rue du Maréchal-Joffre, Châteauroux, with his five siblings. His mother was not very affectionate, and sometimes violent to her children. His father, who suffered from a severe alcohol addiction, was often absent from home. Depardieu helped his mother when she was in labour with his younger brothers and sisters. His family eventually nicknamed him "Pétard" or "Pétarou", because of the habit he had acquired of breaking wind incessantly. Depardieu's parents were both born in 1923; Anne died of a heart attack in 1988 and René, who suffered from cirrhosis, died two months after her.
Depardieu spent more time on the streets than in school, leaving at the age of 13. Practically illiterate and half stammering, he learned to read only later. In his 2014 autobiography, Depardieu revealed that he had prostituted himself as a child, starting when he was 10 years old and could already pass as 15. He would sometimes rob his clients. He was later employed at a printworks, and took part in boxing matches in his spare time. He also supported himself by working as a beach attendant during summers.
During his difficult adolescence, he turned to theft and smuggling all kinds of goods, notably cigarettes and alcohol, to the G.I.s at the large American air base of Châteauroux-Déols. He also acted as a bodyguard for two prostitutes who came down from Paris on the G.I.s' payday. Depardieu later credited those two women with teaching him sex. In a 2005 interview, he said that he was arrested several times and put on probation at one point, but never went to prison; in his autobiography, he said that at the age of 16, he had gone to prison for three months for car theft. In 1968, Depardieu's childhood best friend Jacky Merveille, also a hoodlum from Châteauroux, died in a car accident. This prompted Depardieu, who had already moved to Paris at that time, to consider his future and to try and do something with his life.
Career
Early roles and stardom
As a teenager, Depardieu befriended Michel Pilorgé, a slightly older boy from a more affluent background. In 1965, Pilorgé, whose family owned a flat in Paris and who wanted to settle in the capital to become an actor, proposed Depardieu, then aged 16, to come with him. Depardieu accepted and left Châteauroux for Paris. Out of curiosity, he began attending the acting class Pilorgé was taking at the Théâtre National Populaire. One day the teacher, Lucien Arnaud, noticed Depardieu and asked him to perform. The experience helped trigger Depardieu's vocation.Depardieu next took acting classes with Jean-Laurent Cochet while making a living as a door-to-door salesman. To compensate for his lack of education, he heavily studied the classics. At Cochet's request, he followed a therapy with Alfred A. Tomatis to correct his disastrous diction.
Depardieu became the boyfriend, and later husband, of actress Élisabeth Guignot, who introduced him into entertainment circles and the Parisian bourgeoisie. In 1966, Guignot brought him on the first film project he worked on, Christmas Carole, directed by Agnès Varda, where he was cast as a beatnik. The film was never completed due to a lack of funding and distribution deal. In 1967, Depardieu made his first actual screen appearance in the short film Le Beatnik et le minet, directed by Roger Leenhardt; his diction was still so bad at the time that his voice had to be dubbed by another actor.
Working on stage, Depardieu also appeared in café-théâtres and became a regular performer at the Café de la Gare headed by Romain Bouteille and Sotha, where he met Patrick Dewaere, Coluche, and Miou-Miou. He acquired a reputation thanks to his "instinctive" approach to acting. The first feature film he worked on was Michel Audiard's crime spoof Le cri du cormoran, le soir au-dessus des jonques. In 1971, Jean-Louis Livi became his agent and "mentor", introducing him into Artmedia, France's main casting agency. Theater director Claude Régy was enthusiastic about Depardieu, whom he found "extraordinary" and gifted in an "abnormal" way: he cast him in several plays, including Peter Handke's The Ride across Lake Constance which Depardieu later credited with jump-starting his career.
Depardieu appeared in various supporting roles in films and on television, often portraying hoodlums and petty criminals. He played a similar character in the film where he had his first major role, Bertrand Blier's raunchy and controversial comedy Les Valseuses. Blier was initially reluctant about casting Depardieu but the actor, who felt that the character's background strongly resembled his own, pestered him until he won the role. The film, in which Depardieu co-starred with Dewaere and Miou-Miou, was a huge box office success in France, gaining a cult following and making instant stars of the three actors. Depardieu and Blier subsequently had a long working relationship, making eight more films together. That same year, Depardieu was part of the ensemble cast of Claude Sautet's Vincent, François, Paul and the Others, which came to be regarded as a classic of French cinema.
Depardieu's other prominent films during the 1970s included the psychological thriller Seven Deaths by Prescription which earned him his first César Award nomination, Barbet Schroeder's controversial erotic drama Maîtresse, and André Téchiné's romantic thriller Barocco where he co-starred with Isabelle Adjani. Also in 1976, Depardieu played a lead role in Bernardo Bertolucci's Italian historical epic 1900, where he co-starred with Robert De Niro and an international ensemble cast that included Donald Sutherland, Stefania Sandrelli and Burt Lancaster. The thriller This Sweet Sickness, directed by Claude Miller, was a box-office failure, but earned Depardieu another César Award nomination. During that period, Depardieu also appeared in several experimental films, including two by Marco Ferreri, The Last Woman and Bye Bye Monkey, and two by Marguerite Duras, The Lorry and Baxter, Vera Baxter. He worked again with Bertrand Blier on the quirky sex comedy Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, which won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 1979, and the surreal dark comedy Cold Buffet, which became a cult film in France.