Gérard Xavier Marcel Depardieu (, , French: [ʒeʁaʁ ɡzavje maʁsɛl dəpaʁdjø] ⓘ; born 27 December 1948) is a French actor. Considered an icon of French cinema in the same way as Jean Gabin and Alain Delon, he has appeared in over 200 films since 1967, mostly in leading roles. Depardieu has worked with more than 150 film directors, including major filmmakers such as François Truffaut, Alain Resnais, Ridley Scott, Peter Weir and Bernardo Bertolucci. He is the second highest-grossing actor in the history of French cinema behind Louis de Funès, with roughly 60 of his films selling more than one million admissions in France. He has portrayed various well-known historical and fictitious figures, including Cyrano de Bergerac, Georges Danton, Christopher Columbus, Jean Valjean, Edmond Dantès and Porthos, as well as Obelix in four of the live action Asterix films. Beyond acting, Depardieu is a film producer, businessman and vineyard owner. He has occasionally directed films and performed as a singer. His body of work includes extensive television productions, several records and, as of 2025, 19 stage plays and 9 books.
Growing up in poverty in Châteauroux, central France, Depardieu experienced a difficult youth and was a juvenile delinquent before settling in Paris, where he became an actor. His breakthrough came in 1974 with the film Going Places, which propelled him to overnight stardom. He quickly established himself as a major figure in European cinema and demonstrated his versatility by appearing in a wide variety of films, spanning both mainstream and auteur productions. He has received acclaim for his performances in The Last Metro (1980), where he won the César Award for Best Actor, Police (1985), for which he won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor, Jean de Florette (1986), and Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), where he won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival and his second César Award for Best Actor as well as garnering a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. He started a Hollywood career with Green Card (1990), winning a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor, and later appeared in several high-budget English-language films, including 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), The Man in the Iron Mask (1998), and Life of Pi (2012).
Besides his acting accolades, Depardieu has garnered various honors, including appointments as a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur and the Ordre national du Mérite. He was granted citizenship of Russia in January 2013. During the early 2010s, his tax exile in Russia and his support of Vladimir Putin caused controversy in France.
Depardieu was accused of sexual misconduct as early as the 1990s, though this did not develop into formal complaints until the late 2010s. In December 2020, French authorities charged him with rape. Depardieu denied any wrongdoing but a number of controversies, not limited to the accusations of rape, have since damaged his popularity in France and abroad. This resulted in several of his honors being rescinded in 2023, notably the National Order of Quebec. In May 2025, he was convicted of sexual assault against two women in a separate case. He has appealed against his sentencing.
Early life
Gérard Xavier Marcel Depardieu was born on 27 December 1948 in Châteauroux, Indre, France, to a working-class family. He is the third of six children of Alice Jeanne Josèphe (née Marillier), a stay-at-home mother known as "La Lilette", and René Maxime Lionel Depardieu (better known in his neighborhood as "Dédé" because he could write only "DD"), a metal worker and volunteer fireman. Not wishing to have another child at the time, Depardieu's mother tried unsuccessfully to abort him. According to his older brother Alain, the family had a decent standard of living during the eldest children's early years, but fell into severe poverty after more siblings were born and their father developed alcohol problems.
Depardieu grew up in a two-room apartment at 39 rue du Maréchal-Joffre, Châteauroux, with his five siblings. His mother was not very affectionate, and sometimes violent to her children while his father, an untalkative introvert who struggled with alcohol addiction, was often absent from home. Depardieu helped his mother when she was in labor with his younger brothers and sisters. The family’s life was further disrupted by the fact that René’s mother and Alice's father were having an affair. Gérard’s childhood nickname was "Pétard" or "Pétarou", because of the habit he had acquired of breaking wind incessantly. Depardieu's parents were both born in 1923; Alice died of a heart attack in 1988; René, who suffered from cirrhosis, died two months after her.
Depardieu spent more time on the streets than in school, leaving at the age of 13. Practically illiterate and struggling with a stutter, he learned to read only later. In his 2014 autobiography, Ça s'est fait comme ça, Depardieu revealed that he had prostituted himself as a child, starting when he was 10 years old and could already pass as 15. He would sometimes rob his clients. He was later employed at a printworks, and took part in boxing matches in his spare time. He also supported himself by working as a beach attendant during summers.
During his difficult adolescence, Depardieu turned to theft and smuggling, selling goods like cigarettes and alcohol to the G.I.s at the large American air base of Châteauroux-Déols. He also acted as a bodyguard for two prostitutes who traveled down from Paris on the G.I.s' payday. Depardieu later credited those two women with teaching him about sex. In a 2005 interview, he stated that he was arrested multiple times and put on probation at one point, but never went to prison. He contradicted this in his 2014 autobiography, revealing that he had served three months for car theft at age 16. In 1968, Depardieu's childhood best friend and fellow Châteauroux hoodlum, Jacky Merveille, died in a car accident. This prompted Depardieu—who had relocated to Paris by that time—to reconsider his future and make something of his life.
Career
Early roles and breakthrough
As a teenager, Depardieu befriended Michel Pilorgé, a slightly older boy from a more affluent background. In 1965, Pilorgé, whose family owned a flat in Paris and who planned to settle in the capital to become an actor, invited Depardieu, then 16, to come along. Depardieu accepted and left Châteauroux for Paris. Out of curiosity, he began attending the acting class Pilorgé was taking at the Théâtre National Populaire. One day the teacher, Lucien Arnaud, noticed Depardieu and asked him to perform. The experience helped trigger Depardieu's vocation.
Depardieu next took acting classes with Jean-Laurent Cochet while making a living as a door-to-door salesman. To compensate for his lack of formal education, he studied the classics intensely. At Cochet's request, he underwent therapy with Alfred A. Tomatis to correct his disastrous diction. Depardieu later said that working on theatre texts had taught him to "read and speak".
Depardieu became the boyfriend, and later husband, of actress Élisabeth Guignot, whom he had met at Cochet's class. She introduced him to the Parisian bourgeoisie and entertainment circles, including directors Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda, whose child he occasionally babysat for spare change. In 1966, Guignot also brought him on the first film project he worked on, Christmas Carole, directed by Varda, where he was cast as a beatnik. The film was never completed due to a lack of funding and distribution deal. In 1967, Depardieu made his first actual screen appearance in the short film Le Beatnik et le minet, directed by Roger Leenhardt; his diction was still so bad at the time that his voice had to be dubbed by another actor.
Depardieu's stage work also included performing in the type of small venues known in France as café-théâtres. This led him to appear regularly at the comedy theater Café de la Gare, where he met future onscreen co-stars Patrick Dewaere, Coluche, and Miou-Miou. He quickly earned a reputation for his "instinctive" approach to acting. The first feature film he worked on was Michel Audiard's crime spoof Le Cri du cormoran le soir au-dessus des jonques, released in 1971. That same year, Jean-Louis Livi became his agent and "mentor", introducing him to Artmedia, France's leading talent agency. Around 1972, theatre director Claude Régy became enthusiastic about Depardieu, whom he found "extraordinary" and gifted in an "abnormal" way: he cast him in several plays, including Peter Handke's The Ride across Lake Constance, a production Depardieu later credited with jump-starting his career. Depardieu’s supporting role in the crime film Le Tueur (1972) impressed its veteran star, Jean Gabin, who imposed him on the directors of two subsequent films. For his stage work, Depardieu received the Gérard Philipe Prize in 1973, awarded by the City of Paris to distinguish promising theatre performers.
In his early career, Depardieu was often cast as a hoodlum or petty criminal in supporting roles on film and television. He portrayed a similar figure in the film where he had his first major role, Bertrand Blier's raunchy and controversial comedy Les Valseuses (Going Places, 1974). Blier was initially reluctant about casting Depardieu but the actor, who felt that the character's background strongly resembled his own, pestered him until he won the role. The film, in which Depardieu co-starred with Dewaere and Miou-Miou, was a huge box office success in France, gaining a cult following and making instant stars of the three actors. Depardieu and Blier subsequently had a long working relationship, making eight more films together.
Rise to stardom
Depardieu followed his 1974 breakthrough by appearing during the same year in Claude Sautet's Vincent, François, Paul and the Others, alongside an ensemble cast of established actors. Also a box-office hit, the film became a classic of French cinema.
From the outset, Depardieu distinguished himself as an unusually prolific and versatile actor, starring in several films a year and alternating between mainstream productions and more demanding avant-garde films. His other prominent films during the 1970s included the psychological thriller 7 morts sur ordonnance (1975) which earned him his first nomination to the César Award for Best Actor. In 1976, he starred in Barbet Schroeder's controversial erotic drama Maîtresse, and in André Téchiné's romantic thriller Barocco where he co-starred with Isabelle Adjani. Also in 1976, Depardieu played a lead role alongside Robert De Niro in Bernardo Bertolucci's two-part Italian historical epic 1900, featuring an international ensemble cast that included Donald Sutherland, Stefania Sandrelli, Dominique Sanda, and Burt Lancaster. Although the film's five-hour length and Marxist-influenced content caused controversy upon release, it was later regarded as a classic.
While Claude Miller's thriller This Sweet Sickness (1977), where Depardieu starred as a deranged antihero, was a box-office failure, it nonetheless earned the actor another César Award nomination. During this period, Depardieu also appeared in several arthouse or experimental projects, including two films by Marco Ferreri, The Last Woman (1976) and Bye Bye Monkey (1978), and two by Marguerite Duras, The Lorry (1977) and Baxter, Vera Baxter (1978).
Depardieu reunited with Bertrand Blier and Patrick Dewaere on the quirky sex comedy Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (1978), which won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. The following year, he collaborated with Blier again on the surreal dark comedy Buffet froid (Cold Cuts, 1979), which later became a cult film in France.
Peak of success
1980s
In 1980, Depardieu achieved widespread acclaim and commercial success across several prominent films. He starred in Alain Resnais's internationally successful My American Uncle and partnered with Isabelle Huppert in Loulou, a drama directed by Maurice Pialat. Though Depardieu's first working relationship with Pialat was difficult, the two later grew close and initiated a long-running collaboration, going on to make three more films together. He also starred alongside Catherine Deneuve in François Truffaut's The Last Metro, a romantic drama set in Nazi-occupied Paris. The film was a major box-office success and earned Depardieu his first César Award for Best Actor. Depardieu closed out 1980 by co-starring with Coluche in the box-office hit Inspector Blunder, a crime comedy in which he played the antagonist, and reuniting with Deneuve in Claude Berri's romance film Je vous aime. He subsequently formed a long professional partnership with Berri—who had also produced Inspector Blunder—and co-starred with Deneuve in six more films.
That same year, Depardieu also tried his hand at singing and released several records—including a rock song he performed in Je vous aime—and an LP featuring lyrics written by his wife. Later in his career, he occasionally participated in musical projects. Nevertheless, he remained modest about his abilities as a singer, stating in 2017, "I don't know if I'm singing in tune. Plus, I don't give a fuck."
Throughout the early 1980s, Depardieu sustained a prolific run of critical and commercial hits, including his second and last film with François Truffaut, the romantic drama The Woman Next Door (1981) opposite Fanny Ardant. Other notable films included the period drama The Return of Martin Guerre (1982) alongside Nathalie Baye, and Andrzej Wajda's historical drama Danton (1983). During this era, he also starred in a pair of successful features directed by Alain Corneau, the crime film Choice of Arms (1981), where he played a violent gangster opposite Yves Montand and Catherine Deneuve, and the war drama Fort Saganne (1984), which reunited him once more with Deneuve and co-starred Sophie Marceau. One major disappointment during that period was Jean-Jacques Beineix's The Moon in the Gutter (1983); the film failed to meet box-office expectations and was later openly disparaged by the actor.
Also in 1984, Depardieu made his directorial debut with Le tartuffe, an adaptation of Molière's classic play in which he starred as the title character; Depardieu conceived it as a filmed version of the play, which he was performing at the time at the National Theatre of Strasbourg. The reception was disappointing for both the play and the film. Depardieu rarely returned to directing thereafter. He next reunited with Sophie Marceau in the crime drama Police (1985), his second film with Maurice Pialat. For his performance in that film, he was awarded the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival. While this film marked Depardieu's reconciliation with Pialat, the actor had a tense relationship with Marceau, who later said that her co-star and the director had teamed up to torment her on the shoot.