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French acting legend Gerard Depardieu has rarely strayed far from controversy but his career and reputation now lie in ruins.
The disgraced 76-year-old has been found guilty of sexually assaulting two women, in the most high-profile MeToo trial France has seen to date. He denied the allegations against him, but it is not the first time he has been accused of wrongdoing.
Below we look at the turbulent career of one of France’s most celebrated performers who met the Pope, dined with Princess Diana and has called Fidel Castro and Vladimir Putin a close friend.
Who is Gerard Depardieu?
Born the third of six children in a working-class neighbourhood in Châteauroux, France in 1948, Depardieu began life as a street hustler, trading stolen cigarettes and alcohol to American GIs to help his large family make ends meet. His father, Dédé, was an illiterate, alcohol-dependent sheet metal worker; his mother, Lilette, so crushed by poverty, once told him that she considered aborting young Gerard with a knitting needle.
In his autobiography Ça s’est fait comme ça (“That’s the Way it Was), he recounted robbing the graves of newly buried bodies, getting into fights and prostituting himself to passing lorry drivers. He spent three months in prison after stealing a car. School holidays were spent in the public toilets of Orly airport outside Paris, where his grandmother was an attendant.
His early mystique was enhanced by the fact that he ran away from home at the age of 13 and took drama lessons at the behest of a psychologist who urged him to act out his traumas. Since then, Depardieu has won fame and fortune acting in more than 250 films since 1967.
As a child, his nickname was Petarou – the little firecracker. As an adult, he was referred to by the late Marguerite Duras, who directed him in two films, as "a big, beautiful runaway truck of a man".
In 1970, Depardieu married Élisabeth Guignot, with whom he had two children: actor Guillaume, who died from complications of drug addiction and a motorbike accident, and actress Julie. In 1992, after divorcing Guignot, he had a daughter, Roxane, with the model Karine Silla.
From Obelix to Stalin - how Depardieu became the darling of French cinema
Internationally, Depardieu is a huge cinematic figure– a Golden Globe winner and an Oscar nominee. Among his 250 film credits are lead roles as varied as dictator Joseph Stalin, a priest, a hunchbacked peasant, fictitious medieval warrior Obelix, a car salesman, a sculptor and a gangster.
Depardieu has worked with revolutionary new-wave filmmakers such as François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Marguerite Duras, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol.
His performance as the ungainly, big-nosed soldier with the romantic soul in Cyrano de Bergerac was praised by critics, winning the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. And in Abel Ferrara’s 2014 feature Welcome to New York he starred as a powerful politician accused of raping a maid in a New York hotel.
Sex assault allegations and trial
On Tuesday Depardieu was found guilty of trapping a woman he worked with with his legs before groping her in front of witnesses. In an interview with Mediapart, the 54-year-old set dresser said Depardieu made lewd comments, grabbed her forcefully, and had to be pulled away by bodyguards.
A second woman, a 34-year-old assistant director, alleged she was groped both on set and in the street. The court sided with both women.
The actor has been handed an 18-month suspended sentence, in line with the prosecution’s requests, and could face a €75,000 (£62,000) fine. He will also be put on the sex offender register. Depardieu has denied all the allegations and will be appealing the decision.
The verdict was welcomed by respresentatives of the victims.
"It is the victory of two women, but it is the victory of all the women beyond this trial," said Carine Durrieu-Diebolt, the set dresser's lawyer. "Today we hope to see the end of impunity for an artist in the world of cinema. I think that with this decision we can no longer say that he is not a sexual abuser. And today, as the Cannes Film Festival opens, I'd like the film world to spare a thought for Depardieu's victims."
What other controversies has Depardieu been embroiled in?
The actor was reportedly blacklisted in Hollywood after being quoted by Time magazine in 1991 as saying he participated in his first rape at the age of nine and joined in other sexual attacks later because in his world "it was absolutely normal."
Depardieu has denied making the comment, saying that he has too much respect for women to have ever assaulted them sexually. The actor, who was making a film on the island of Mauritius at the time the quotes surfaced issued a statement that said, "Of course, one can say I had sexual experiences at a very young age, but never rape. ... I am profoundly wounded by what has happened.”
Depardieu subsequently accused Time of mistranslating the quote, insisting that he had admitted only to having witnessed rapes.
"I have always been treated honestly and justly by the American press," Depardieu said later, expressing bewilderment over the charges. "I have a wife and children. I am not going to let myself be treated as a rapist."
Anecdotes about Depardieu’s marathon drinking bouts became infamous, and he confessed to drinking 14 bottles of wine a day.
In 1998, Depardieu survived a high-speed motorbike crash when he was five times over the limit on the way to the shooting of Asterix and Obelix vs. Caesar.
No charges were filed against the 49-year-old actor, who underwent surgery to repair damage to his knee, which delayed the $45 million production.
Parisian prosecutors dismissed a complaint by actor Hélène Darras, who claimed that he had groped and propositioned her on the set of the 2007 film Disco. The case was abandoned after exceeding the statute of limitations; a dozen other women also lodged allegations against the actor last year.
Depardieu, then 75, denied any wrongdoing, and he has not been convicted in connection with any of the accusations against him.
The actor was kicked off a flight to Dublin for urinating publicly in 2011. Depardieu apologised and fellow actor Edouard Baer attributed it to prostate issues.
In 2014, there was another media storm after he cosied up to Vladimir Putin, who signed an executive order granting him Russian citizenship.
He claims to have hit it off with Putin because “we could both have ended up as hoodlums.” Mr Putin was apparently attracted to “the fact that I had occasionally been picked up off the pavement dead drunk.”
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