(2 of 2)
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? "Yes," he admits, "but it was absolutely normal in those 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.