Gerard Depardieu’s shady past from grave robber to rent boy, bullfighter and brawler revealed — as he’s accused of sex attack
A confessed grave robber and thief, French film star Gerard Depardieu is now accused of fresh crimes which could destroy his legacy
TO call Gerard Depardieu the wild man of cinema would be near-criminal understatement.
He’s confessed to grave robbery, a spell as a thieving rent boy and to drinking 14 bottles of wine a day.
France’s biggest movie star once relieved himself in a bottle mid-flight, headbutted a photographer, spent time behind bars and was called “a coward, a cheat and a fraud” by his SON.
Now the 69-year-old actor faces claims that he raped a 22-year-old actress this summer at one of his Paris homes — and his outrageous past may come back to haunt him.
The star of Green Card and Life Of Pi denies the attacks, which are being investigated by the police.
And yet despite his rotund frame and vast nose, Depardieu has enjoyed a life rich with female attention, having dated former Bond beauty Carole Bouquet and now seeing writer Clementine Igou, who is more than 30 years his junior.
Once the darling of French cinema, where his bad behaviour was met with a Gallic shrug, Depardieu’s popularity collapsed in his homeland when he took up first Belgian and then Russian citizenship in order to avoid high taxes.
What didn’t help was describing France as a country “populated by foreigners and imbeciles making wine and stinky cheese”.
His was a remarkable rise to the top for a school drop out born to a dirt-poor alcoholic father and a mother who considered aborting him with knitting needles.
He quit school at 13 to flog cigarettes and booze to American soldiers staying near his home town of Chateauroux, in central France.
Other shady sources of income included working as a bodyguard for prostitutes, digging up bodies to steal their valuables and nicking cars, spending three weeks in prison at 16 for motor vehicle theft.
In his autobiography It Happened Like That he admitted working as a rent boy as a teenager.
Depardieu confessed: “At 20, the thug in me was alive and kicking. I would rip some of them off. I would beat up some bloke and leave with all his money.”
Even more shocking was the rape culture he alluded to in an interview he gave in 1978 to a magazine called Film Comment, where he said: “I had plenty of rapes, too many to count.”
During a chat with Time magazine ahead of the Oscars in 1991, when he was up for Best Actor, the Frenchman was asked if he had taken part in these sexual assaults.
He replied “yes”, adding, “But it was absolutely normal in those circumstances. That was part of my childhood.”
After the article was published Depardieu claimed his comments had been mistranslated, and yet during a TV show he suddenly kissed the daughter of former French president Francois Mitterrand on the cheek and shouted “Hello beautiful, I didn’t see you there”.
And he snogged and fondled a female reporter from Argentina at an awards ceremony. Perhaps creating a scene is part of his persona.
Jonathan Ross was witness to that in 2005 when Depardieu stubbed out his cigarette on the studio floor and swore during what appeared to be a drunken interview.
The Frenchman later claimed he was merely acting, yet he is not one to hide his love of booze.
After undergoing heart surgery, for which he turned up to hospital on the back of a motorbike, doctors told him to quit alcohol and his beloved Gitanes cigarettes.
He gave up cigs but could only reduce his wine intake from 14 bottles a day to six.
Depardieu fathered four children with three women: Guillaume, who died at the age of 37 in 2008, and Julie, 45, with actress Elisabeth Guignot during their 26 year marriage.
He had daughter Roxane, 26, with actress Karine Silla and son Jean, 12, with Helene Bizot.
He seems to get on well with his exes, and once said: “I had children with really wonderful women. I still like them.
"I think we can learn everything from women. And I especially learnt from women who have been my lovers or my mistresses.”
14 Bottles of wine a day
GERARD likes a drink and told French magazine So Film before his heart op: “I can absorb 12, 13, 14 bottles per day.
"It starts at home with champagne or red wine before 10am, then again champagne.
"I break up the wine with a little pastis.
“Then food, accompanied by two bottles of wine.
"In the afternoon, champagne, beer and more pastis.
“Later, vodka and/or whisky.
"But I’m never totally drunk, just a little p***ed.
"A ten-minute nap and voila, a slurp of rose wine and I feel fresh as a daisy.”
His uninhibited approach to life rubbed off on his son Guillaume in the worst way, though, with his son serving time for heroin dealing and threatening a man with a gun.
Their was an uneasy relationship, with Guillaume once saying: “Gerard Depardieu is a coward, a cheat and a fraud.
"There is nothing in his life but deceit; he’s the only person I know who lies to his analyst.
"He’s rotten through and through.”
Even the actor’s colleagues know to be wary of the portly bon viveur.
French director Bertrand Blier said: “We literally had to follow him at night to stop him getting into punch-ups.
“He would deliberately go into the most dangerous areas, looking for trouble. Even now when he arrives at the door, I think, ‘Christ, where are the valuables?’”
Now Depardieu finds himself in the greatest trouble of his life.
It will be up to the judicial system to decide if France’s great survivor can come back from the rape claims.
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