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Depardieu lives his life as if there were no tomorrow. It is his active nature, this driving force that comes from inside him. In that, at least for one day, everyone has had the desire to be to like him.
Frantic, anguished, glued to the phone, he is ready for anything.
He eats greedily like four, drinks like six, loves like twelve. How many movies has he shot since his first, Le Dri du cormoran le soir au-dessus des jonques in 1970? Close to a hundred and twenty. He takes them all on bodily, the characters as real beings. He works without relaxation, with the biggest names: six movies in 1977, with Marguerite Duras, Claude Miller, Bertrand Blier, Marco Ferreri, Gérard Zingg and Daniel Schmid. A fast pace. Thus frantic, anguished twice over (look at his gnawed nails), the ear glued to his telephones making deals, he's ready for anything: thin like a thread for Fort Saganne, thick like a menhir for Astérix and Obélix against Caesar. It is during the filming of Under Satan's Sun, 1987 - seeing his cassock stretch itself on his stomach - that he repeated the words of the footballer George Best: "Once I stopped drinking, eating and making love. It was the worst ten minutes of my life."
He gathers the extremes. Not astonishing that the heart vacillated.
At the bottom, he is a Rabelaisian doubling as a child of heart. He thunders, laughs without restraint and eats mightily. That is the Rabelaisian. But there is also the child thirsty for love, nearly shy, that asks for affection, that one admires a little and coaxes a lot. That is the child of heart. Depardieu is a divided man. He is capable of getting drunk to death at a festival in Russia, of blushing because one gives him a kind word in an airport. He gathers the extremes. Not astonishing that the heart vacillated.
Will it be necessary for him, even him, henceforth, to assume a more rigorous hygiene: will he move to the diet without salt, without fat, without sugar, without everything that is good? He was born to play Rasputin, Don Quixote, Falstaff, Néron, the immense, the biggest natures. He was Tartuffe, Danton, Jean of Florette, Rodin, Cyrano of Bergerac, Christopher Columbus, Obélix and Vatel. Between roles, he is Gérard, the Frenchest of France, equally likely to bawl and to yawn, fork and glass in the hand. At 51 years, Gérard Depardieu has a fixed-up heart. Let's suggest to him the diet of garlic. Dear Gérard, this diet consists in putting garlic in everything that one eats. One doesn't get thinner, but people move back. And, from afar, one appears thinner.
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