Gérard Depardieu

Gérard Depardieu, a French actor, was born on 27th December 1948 in Indre, France to migrant laborers named Anne Jeane Joséphe and René Maxime Lionel Depardieu who worked as a metal worker and fireman. Having grown up in poverty, he received very little formal education before leaving it completely at the age of 13. In 2015, he moved to Paris, where he got the opportunity to study acting. 

From “Café de la Gare”, a small traveling theatre, is where his acting career began. In 1965, his first screen appearance began with a short film called Le Beatnik et le minet (1965) before he started appearing in small roles in the early 1970s. The first notable appearance that brought Gérard to the limelight was Bertrand Blier’s Going Places (1974) in which he acted as a young thug. From this film, his popularity started to grow enormously. Moreover, Gérard’s other prominent early films included Maitresse (1975) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1990 (1976) in which he starred alongside Robert De Niro. He earned his first César Award for Best Actor in Francois Truffaut’s directed The Last Metro (1980) in which he was cast beside Catherine Deneuve and the movie also won the César Award for Best Film. He went on to win another César Award for Best Actor and Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) before being nominated for an Academy Award for the same film making it one of his most prominent films. In his acting career, Gérard Depardieu also won several awards at international film festivals, and in 1996, he was awarded “Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur”, the highest French order for merit. He last appeared in the movie Diane de Poitiers (2022). 

In 1971, Gérard married Elisabeth Guignot and had two children with her, actor Guillaume who died from pneumonia in 2008, and actress Julie who was born in 1973. However, the couple got separated in 1996, and in 1997, Gérard began his relationship with actress Carole Bouquet who remained his partner till 2005.    

Depardieu has been involved in several controversies during his acting career particularly, in 1990, he was convicted of drunk driving in France for which he was given a 2-month jail sentence which was suspended, and his driving license was revoked for 6 months. Later, in 1991, Time magazine published a story citing Gérard’s interview which he gave in 1978 that he was involved in rape when he was 9 years old, and ever since he participated in more than he can count. Once published, Depardieu’s team rejected the story saying the story was the result of a mistranslation. The actor only admitted that he has witnessed rapes and did not commit them. However, the story was not retracted by the magazine.