TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/020491/0204460.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.7 KB | 120 lines

                                                                                SHOW BUSINESS, Page 68

Life in a Big Glass


Gerard Depardieu has an appetite for wine, words and stardom

By RICHARD CORLISS -- Reported by Victoria Foote-Greenwell/Paris


    Gerard Depardieu, France's best and best-known actor, is a
glutton for adventure. He eats with two hands, acts with both
fists. Onscreen he radiates wild energy, acting from his
capacious gut, whispering or raging as the role allows and the
moment demands. He embodies the primal male caged in modern
society, ever raising the ante on his own anarchic instincts.
To call him a bear of a man is to give bears too much credit;
they have not his strut, his growl, his formidable charisma.
It is said that when French bears see a particularly imposing
member of their species, they exclaim, "Ah, mon Dieu! Un
Depardieu!"

    To older American moviegoers, the archetypal Frenchman was
a suave seducer: Maurice Chevalier, Charles Boyer, Louis
Jourdan. But French audiences preferred men of the earth --
Raimu, Jean Gabin, Jean-Paul Belmondo -- to men of the world.
Depardieu, 42, is cut from this rough cloth. This versatile
actor can play comical, tragical and historical, as well as
pastoral, but his most famous roles are as peasants: the duped
Jean de Florette, the mysterious Martin Guerre, the noble Olmo
in Bertolucci's 1900. He has assayed the holy fools of French
history and literature: Danton, Tartuffe and, in a recent
triumph playing in the U.S., Cyrano de Bergerac.

    "He is the heir of Jean Gabin -- the soul of France," says
Bertrand Blier, writer-director of six Depardieu films,
including the Oscar-winning Get Out Your Handkerchiefs and the
new Merci la Vie. "Like all the great talents, Gerard is a raw
talent -- art brut. They learn a little technique doing
theater, but the rest is inside them. Brando, Dustin Hoffman,
Mastroianni: he's in that great class." Like those actors,
Depardieu is capable of melodramatic excess; to give all is
sometimes to give too much. But also like them, he has set an
indelible stamp on his country's films, defining current French
cinema as fully as any auteur.

    Now he has set his sights on America, with his first
Hollywood film, Green Card. In this featherweight comedy he is
a French musician looking for residence status and finding love
and sweet sorrow with Andie MacDowell in exotic Manhattan. For
Depardieu, though, the piece is just a five-finger exercise.
Director Peter Weir, who wrote the film for the actor, is
looking for charm -- any star can manufacture that -- without
Depardieu's scary power. The bear is reduced to a puppy dog.

    Close up, offscreen, Depardieu gives you the charm and the
power. The man can swagger sitting down. His lank hair, which
looks as if he swiped it from a schoolgirl who has played hooky
all year long, frames a huge face -- bulbous nose and ship-prow
chin dominating the small, lively eyes. Devouring a steak over
lunch at the swank George V hotel in Paris, he cascades
opinions on any subject, from Dostoyevsky to David Letterman,
punctuating his effusions with grand, intense gestures. When
a waitress arrives to pour the St. Pourcain, Depardieu proffers
the larger of his two stem glasses. "But, Monsieur, that's for
the water," she admonishes. "No, no," replies the proud owner
of vineyards in Burgundy and Anjou, "I like wine in a big
glass."

    Depardieu, who has two children, 19 and 17, with his wife
Elizabeth, also likes life in a big glass. As a child, though,
he drank too much too soon -- so much so that his early years
play like a more desperate version of his first hit film, Going
Places, in which he was a petty thief and vicious womanizer.
The son of an illiterate weaver in the nowhere town of
Chateauroux, young Gerard stole cars and sold black-market
cigarettes and whiskey to American soldiers at a nearby Army
base. He carried a gun at school. "But that was a child's
game," he shrugs. "I just had the gun a week, to show it to my
friends." And what of his story that at nine he participated in
his first rape? "Yes." And after that, there were many rapes?

circumstances. That was part of my childhood."

    In this childhood Gerard was predator as well as victim, yet
it created in him an ache for advancement. He quit school at
15 and, through copious, self-administered doses of
Dostoyevsky, soon fell under the spell of language. It was love
at first sentence. "I first read so that I could communicate,"
he says. "But the difference in social classes was so enormous!
If you come from a background like mine, you aren't able to
speak. No one says, `I love you.' Everyone screams, cries or
is afraid. When I arrived in my first drama class and heard the
words Je t'aime, I thought, `There are people who can say
that!'"

    For a time, Depardieu could say nothing. "I lost the power
to speak," he recalls. "I was dumb, from hyperemotion, and
because I felt overwhelmed by everything I was reading. I was
able to find words by speaking out loud the words I was
reading. And it was then, at that moment, that everything
became unblocked. It was like a second birth." Since then he
has spoken the French of Rostand and Moliere on screens around
the world. In Green Card he speaks English, heavily garnished
but with assurance. He can even tell when he has been insulted
by a TV-talk-show host. "Letterman is very fast, very cynical,
very sarcastic. I don't mind that. I don't need to be
intelligent or not intelligent. There are moments I am a
complete idiot, and others when I'm less of an idiot. That's
all."

    The Idiot. Who wrote that book? No matter: Gerard Depardieu
could play the part. He has the appetite for it.