Depardieu, Gérard

Depardieu, Gérard (1948- ), French film actor, known for his outstanding, complex performances in a variety of roles. He was born in Châteauroux, moving in his late teens to Paris, where he took up acting and appeared on stage at the Théâtre National Populaire and in television roles. In his 100-plus films since 1972, he has taken a wide variety of roles, ranging from melodrama to comedy.

His earlier films in the 1970s found him mostly in aggressive, male-chauvinist parts, such as the hoodlum in Les Valseuses (1973; Making It); a seducer in La Dernière Femme (1975; The Last Woman); and a burglar in Maîtresse (1976). He won a César, the French equivalent of the Academy Award (Oscar), for his role as an actor in Le Dernier Métro (1980; The Last Metro) directed by François Truffaut, was voted Best Actor in 1983 by the National Society of Film Critics for his performances in the title roles of Le Retour de Martin Guerre (1982; The Return of Martin Guerre) and Danton (1982), and was selected Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival in 1985 for his role as the tough, lonely detective in Police (1984). His comic performances in such films as Les Compères (1984) also won him acclaim.

In 1990 Depardieu played the title role in Cyrano de Bergerac and made his English-language debut in Green Card. Two years later he starred as Christopher Columbus in 1492: Conquest of Paradise, as well as appearing with his son, Guillaume, in Tous les Matins du Monde (Every Morning of the World). In 1994 he played the miner Meheu in Germinal, from the novel by Émile Zola, and starred in Colonel Chabert, based on the novel by Honoré de Balzac. In 1996 Depardieu acted in another literary adaptation, the latest version of the Joseph Conrad novel The Secret Agent, directed and scripted by Christopher Hampton. In the same year he also appeared in Unhook the Stars, in the Kenneth Branagh production of Hamlet, and in Le Plus Beau Métier du Monde (The Best Job in the World). He also starred in a French television adaptation of The Count of Monte-Cristo (1998), based on the Alexandre Dumas novel, and as Obélix in a French film version of the Asterix comics, Astérix et Obélix contre César (1999; Asterix and Obelix Take on Caesar).

While continuing to maintain the depth and scope of his performances in French films and further cementing his position in his home country as the pre-eminent actor of his generation, Depardieu has also continued to make occasional Hollywood appearances; in 1998 he was Porthos in Randall Wallace's The Man in the Iron Mask; and in 2000 he did a comic turn as the villain Jean-Pierre Le Pelt in the Disney live-action sequel 102 Dalmatians. In the period piece Vatel (2000) he was cast as the steward to the Prince de Condé; and in 2001 he appeared in the Francis Veber comedy Le Placard (The Closet); that year he was also seen as the 19th-century detective Eugène François Vidocq in the first feature film shot entirely on high-definition video, Vidocq. In 2003 Depardieu starred in the Jean-Paul Rappeneau comedy Bon Voyage, set at the time of the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, and in the drama Nathalie…, as a husband whose suspicious wife hires a prostitute to incite and then report back the details of his infidelity. In André Téchiné's Les Temps qui Changent (2004, Changing Times) he was a middle-aged man pursuing a former lover (Catherine Deneuve) in Tangiers, in the pair's first film together since Le Dernier Métro; and in 2005's Boudu he re-created the title role originally played by Michel Simon, in a remake of the 1932 Renoir classic Boudu Sauvé des Eaux (Boudu Saved From Drowning). Depardieu's performance as an ageing ballroom singer in the drama Quand J'Etais Chanteur (The Singer) was admired at Cannes in 2006.