The story you are about to read is a tragedy of French cinema, a meditation on
life, death and amputation, the love and hate between a father and son, and
a young man of Paris who lived hard and fast and all too briefly.
“We are born to die,” the actress said to the young man, reciting the lines of
the film they were making in the days before his death. But as she said the
lines, a great sadness welled up inside her and she began crying — real,
unscripted tears — and when she looked at the young man she saw that he was
crying too.
The young man truly believed that his premature death had been foretold at the
moment of his birth, and he had lived most of his 37 years in anticipation
of that fate. By this point he did not have long to go…
No father, surely, or none but a cursed few, ever imagines they will still be
around for their own child’s funeral, but perhaps Gérard Depardieu, more
than most who have faced that unenviable appointment, had some inkling that
he might outlive his actor son. Despite the great chasm that had opened up
between them, Gérard cannot have missed the unhappiness that enveloped
Guillaume, nor his son’s struggle.
On the set of the film, Guillaume complained that he had not heard from his
father in a while and didn’t really speak to him any more. He would send
Gérard texts from his mobile, he said, to keep in touch. But his texts had
not been answered. It was the same with his actress sister, Julie. He sent
her texts, but she did not reply.
Those unanswered texts awakened unhappy childhood memories of the years, from
the age of four onwards, when his father was away being famous and his
mother was also busy working, and Guillaume would be at home with his
sister, who kept herself locked away in her bedroom.
Guillaume seemed especially raw that morning in early October, a few weeks
ago, as he paraded his soul in front of the two women journalists who were
visiting the set of the film. A press visit to a film in production is
ordinarily a routine, if not dull, affair in which the unwelcome guest gets
to stand around for long hours during takes, drinking weak coffee, and,
then, when a break in filming occurs, is treated to hurried interviews that
elicit bland platitudes — “We’re a little community here”, “Everyone’s
working very hard”, “It’s a fascinating story” — from the film’s leading
actors.
Alexandra and Flori, the two Romanian journalists, must have expected more of
the same when they answered the invitation to attend Castel Film Studios —
the place where Cold Mountain and Borat had been made — on the outskirts of
Bucharest on October 2, 2008. Instead they got the unvarnished, possibly
unhinged Guillaume Depardieu in what would be the last interview before his
death.
Quite why Guillaume had chosen to become an actor, competing in the same arena
as his father when he claimed to have spent most of his life trying to
escape from his shadow, is hard to comprehend. He had not yet equalled or
surpassed Gérard’s success but was liked and respected as an actor in
Europe, and was still busy, despite having endured the amputation of his
right leg in 2003.
Guillaume was not quite so lumpy or physically imposing as his father, his
nose not quite so bulbous, though clearly inherited. Guillaume lacked none
of his father’s intensity of performance, however.
This film could have been written for him. L’Enfance d’Icare (The Childhood of
Icarus) was a modern reworking of the Greek myth in which the father makes
his son wings of feather and wax but warns him not to fly too close to the
sun. Icarus gets carried away with the thrill of flying, ignores his
father’s advice and soars too near to the heat. The wax melts, the feathers
burn, Icarus plummets into the sea and drowns.
Guillaume had taken his girlfriend, Réjane Tremel, and her son, Sean, with him
to Romania for filming and, instead of staying in a luxury hotel with the
rest of the crew, he had opted to live in a motorhome, sleeping in different
locations, sometimes in nearby woods, and driving the motorhome to the
studios each day.
Réjane told The Sunday Times Magazine that Guillaume liked living close to
nature, away from the stress of city living. In the early days of filming he
had been full of the joys of life, she said, wanting to sing, to make music,
to act, to recite poetry and to celebrate all the good things in life. If
this was so, something must have gone badly wrong. In mid-September,
according to a reliable family source, Guillaume had been arrested in
Bucharest while naked and brandishing two guns at a waiter. The incident had
been smoothed over, and Guillaume — no stranger to gun incidents — had
escaped without so much as a fine.
It quickly became apparent to the first visiting journalist, Alexandra
Olivotto, that Guillaume “was completely nuts”, while her colleague Flori
Ciuverca saw him as a “really, really sad person”, “deeply unhappy”, if a
little unpredictable.
He told them he had left France to live in exile because of the French
president, Nicolas Sarkozy, whom he referred to as “Sharkozy” and said he
despised. “Sharkozy is from a filthy nobility. I have every reason to be
anti-Sharkozy. I’m not going back to France until the 2012 election, when
I’m standing for president. I’m very serious.”
Perhaps Guillaume’s antipathy towards the French president was, in part at
least, personal. He had recently married Guillaume’s old friend Carla Bruni,
who hailed from the same Left Bank world — the Rive Gauche — as Guillaume.
Whatever the reason, Guillaume said he was keeping on the move, not letting
“people” find out where he was, as if “they” were after him.
“I was in the army, you know — I was in Bosnia.” He had not been in the army,
had never been in Bosnia. In an expression of serious “paranoia”, he
suggested he had been targeted by French government snipers because of his
involvement in dissident broadcasts.
He referred to Réjane as his wife and spoke of her child as his own son. He
then told the journalists he had just cheated on her. He went off and came
out again, this time appearing without a shirt, which revealed a torso
covered with bruises and tattoos. Were they bruises from fights, or what?
The journalists had no idea. They could see what they took to be the
unhealed scars of injection marks on his arms — a further indicator,
perhaps, that he had been continuing to take drugs, despite their effect on
his health.
“It looked like the body of a 50- or 60-year-old,” said Alexandra, “not a
pretty sight.” His hands shook and his voice quavered. Later they watched as
a make-up artist struggled to apply make-up to his face as his eyes kept
watering. When filming was finished, he began drinking beers and smoked
handmade cigarettes, the journalists wondering if they were spliffs or
simple roll-ups. Meanwhile, Guillaume jumped from one theme to the next. He
needed to keep a cool head, he said, or he would kill himself.
n general terms, his life had not been rosy. He had been born in a poor but
happy area of Paris, and when his father began to earn money he became rich
but unhappy. His paternal great-grandmother and grandmother had both been
witches — a white witch and a black witch — and they wanted to induct
Guillaume into witchcraft when he was born, but he had chosen music instead,
spending eight years of his life as a street musician.
He spoke of his seven-year-old daughter, Louise, from his failed marriage to
the actress Elise Ventre. He had been in survival mode since Louise was
born, and it tore him up inside that he now only saw her on the occasional
weekend.
Death was constantly on his mind, he said. “Life invites death. In my family we’ve
all learnt to die with dignity. After all, we have God in our name.” Par
Dieu means literally “by God” or, in the old French exclamation, “my God!”
“From time to time I lose my head, I’m not sure what’s going on, because of my
amputation and that’s always present in the film.”
Réjane would later describe the intensity with which he lived through the film
as well as acted in it, which she saw as his devotion to his art, bringing
the script home in the evenings so that they could work on rewriting his
lines together overnight. He told her the difference between him and his
character was that he knew his limb could never grow back.
“Guillaume loved making the film in Romania and was certain it was going to be
a success,” Réjane said after his death. “The amputation was always with
him, however. He used to go on about how he had to wake up with it every
day. It was not easy to live with. It’s very hard to wake up every morning
with just one leg. He used to go on about the little things which he
couldn’t do, like walking on sand, on sand dunes. We agreed that we would
have loved to do this together, but could not.”
The amputation and the reasons for it are part of Guillaume’s painful history.
But there was something else, which the Romanians did not understand when he
first mentioned it.
The whole interview was like this, they said: they had not probed for
confessions or personal revelations; they simply poured forth from him, as
if he could not keep them in.
They were asking him an innocuous question about what it was like to
collaborate with Romanian actors. Instead of coming up with a bland
platitude about how lovely Romanians were to work with, he said, in a
complete non sequitur, that his mother had taken the drug Distilbène during
her pregnancy with him.
“It was given to women to help them keep their babies, but it made women
infertile and made men prone to suicide,” he explained.
“My mother took Distilbène,” he repeated. “Now you understand why I’m losing
my mind.”
If Guillaume was the enfant terrible of French cinema, as Paris Match was so
fond of describing him, there is no doubt who passed on the title. There
were clear similarities between father and son, still apparent even as they
drew apart from each other, riven by differences in their approach to life.
The Sunday Times Magazine was told by someone close to the family, who did
not wish to be identified, how furious and disappointed Guillaume had been
when Gérard bought him a Rolex Oyster gold watch. Had his father never
noticed he did not wear a watch? Besides, ostentatious jewellery was not
Guillaume’s style. He was all bohemian chic and professed no interest
in material possessions (except, apparently, drugs and weapons).
Guillaume lived in what was described to us as an “outhouse”, loaned or rented
to him by his mother, Elisabeth; it was part of her separation settlement
from Gérard. The “outhouse” is, in fact, a quaint cottage with shuttered
windows and a front door opening on to a back street in Bougival, the Paris
suburb Gérard had colonised in the late 1970s, owning at least three
properties there at one stage.
While Guillaume lived in the outhouse with Réjane, in something approximating
the careless poverty of the unworldly artist, Gérard had moved on to wealthy
Versailles, where he now lived in a “glorious mansion” with the actress
Carole Bouquet. It was the opulent heart of a small empire he had created on
the profits of his success. He had a château in the Loire Valley surrounded
by vineyards, additional vineyards in Bordeaux and Languedoc, and beyond
France in Spain, Morocco and Argentina.
Gérard has opened two expensive restaurants in Paris, within a stone’s throw
of each other, across Gaillon Square in the grand 1st arrondissement. The
restaurants — La Fontaine Gaillon and L’Ecaille de la Fontaine — carry the
subtlest traces of their owner’s presence.
He was said to have invested in oil exploration and to have got on to the
well-paid international lecture circuit, like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
His fame had given him access to a surprising range of powerful figures,
from Pope John Paul II to Fidel Castro, both of whom he was said to be close
to. He used to call his friend Princess Diana “ma vrai reine” (my true
queen).
Meanwhile, he continues to make films at an alarming rate, with some 20
projects started, completed, released or lined up over this year and next.
He remains the greatest film star in France, his life a national obsession
there, much of it played out in the media, especially the bitter disputes
with Guillaume, who had, among many other accusations, publicly criticised
his father for being obsessed with money.
Gérard’s own background was certainly poor and dysfunctional. His
father, Dédé, characterised as a drunk and a dreamer who played no positive
role in Gérard’s upbringing, must have brought shame to his son, who has
described how he sometimes found his father asleep in the gutter as he
walked to school.
Gérard was the third of six children, born in 1948, the year his mother,
Lilette, told him she had hoped to travel and had been disappointed to find
herself pregnant again. She also told him she had tried to terminate the
unborn Gérard with a knitting needle. The family home had been a place of
shouting and disharmony, with no meaningful dialogue, according to Gérard,
many things left unsaid, or never discussed, not least among them the
revelation that Dédé’s mother had carried on an affair over many years with
Lilette’s father. As Gérard once put it in an interview with Le Monde, “They
f***ed, all the time. It left the family shell-shocked, confused, knocked
for six. What it meant was, my grandparents stole my parents’ love.”
He has often spoken of his early years as a voyou, a hoodlum, wheeling and
dealing on the black market, handling a gun, involved in petty car crime and
theft, referring to himself as a pétarou, a firecracker, always fighting and
stealing and once getting his nose broken while sparring with a boxer. He
left home in his early teens and lived for a while with two prostitutes,
fancying himself as a minor gangster, then living as a beach boy in Cap
d’Antibes before being captivated by films and theatre and going off to
Paris to try to become an actor, soon working regularly without any great
success.
In 1971, when he was 22, Gérard married Elisabeth, who was seven years older.
Their first child, Guillaume, was born in April 1971. Maybe Elisabeth had
suffered an earlier miscarriage or there was some other medical problem; she
has never spoken about it. But, for whatever reason, she was one of around
160,000 French women who were prescribed and took Distilbène
(diethylstilbestrol) before it was banned in 1977 (six years after it had
been banned in the US).
The drug was meant to protect against miscarriage and maintain risky
pregnancies, but it soon became apparent that babies were being born with
genital defects. Later, other problems began to reveal themselves in the
babies, including infertility, cancers and psychiatric problems such as
depression and schizophrenia.
Réjane told us that Elisabeth “has always been deeply upset about having taken
this drug, and about the effects it has on her family. She regrets ever
having taken it”.
The precise impact on Guillaume is unclear. He would often say he was born
with bones sticking out in the wrong places and needed a series of 17
operations, “all of them in vain”. Perhaps the clearest account came in the
book Tout Donner (Giving Everything), which he published in 2004 as a series
of interviews, seemingly unstructured and meandering, with the French TV
presenter Marc-Olivier Fogiel.
Fogiel asked Guillaume why he wasn’t more conventional. This was the
reply: “My mother took a medicine, Distilbène. I had body
malformations, extra bones. And so I had lots of operations, such as an
operation on my sex organ. I refused an operation on my bones — but I always
had an extra bone. From the start I wasn’t normal. I wasn’t like the others.
From a young age I felt different.”
Gérard, meanwhile, was about to become famous, with the 1974 Bertrand Blier
film Les Valseuses (Making It). As he has often said, he was poorly prepared
for fatherhood, and thinks he was too young to have children when he did. He
once told Paris Match: “I was still uncultivated, in the middle of educating
myself. I had no framework, no principles, no wisdom. My only model for
being a father was my father — an illiterate on the margin of society.”
While Gérard soared in the world, heading eventually to Hollywood in the 1990
film Green Card, Guillaume floundered, much as Gérard had done before him.
It seems poignant now that Guillaume’s early taste of his father’s world
came when he appeared as a baby in his father’s arms in the 1974 film Pas si
Méchant que ça (later released in the US as The Wonderful Crook). The pair
went on to appear in half a dozen films together, notably Tous les Matins du
Monde (All the Mornings of the World) in 1991, and Aime ton Père (Honour
Your Father) in 2002.
Guillaume always gave the impression that he was left to get on with life and
hence found his way into trouble. He had been difficult to handle even
before his father became famous, he said in his book, not sleeping, getting
up at 4am, making his breakfast, stamping around the house.
With hindsight, perhaps, these were early signs of the psychiatric
disturbances that would trouble him as he got older, the legacy of
Distilbène. But, really, it is impossible to say with certainty, especially
when other factors were feeding his distress. He remembers moving to the big
house in Bougival and how he felt even more alone and not like “normal”
children who were always able to be with their fathers.
He described in his book how he told Gérard that children at school were
teasing him because of his famous name, and Gérard was dismissive, simply
telling him he had better change his name. Asked if he lived like the son of
the famous Gérard, he replied: “No, I was in total anonymity. I invented
plenty of identities, lots of lives… It was my freedom, my gasp of oxygen. I
was firmly Arsène Lupin [one of the aliases he used, the name taken from a
hero of French literary detective fiction].”
He began taking drugs when he was around 14, graduating from glue-sniffing to
cocaine and heroin, apparently a lifelong habit he found hard to break. He
said he was into “self-mutilation”.
Not just self-mutilation, but self-abasement too. Just imagine being a father
often absent from home and reading this about your son’s early teenage
years: “I started earning money this way one evening when I missed my train
home from school. I must have been 15. I was accosted by a man at the
station who said, ‘You have the air of a misfit.’ I said to him, ‘I’ve
missed my train, I’m in the shit, I don’t know what I’m going to do, I
haven’t a coin on me,’ and he said to me, ‘Good, come, I can give you a bit
of bread for a taxi. In the meantime, let me offer you a drink.’ At this
moment, I understood fully. We went to his place, to a sordid bedroom. The
first time, that was it, he paid me 500 francs [50]. Afterwards I went a lot
further!”
With help from a contact close to the family, The Sunday Times Magazine was
able to reconstruct Guillaume’s rap sheet, the history of his criminal
activity, beginning in 1987, aged 16, when he was caught robbing a postbox.
In 1992 he was arrested after going to the magazine publishing house Prisma
Presse and destroying its switchboard — one of Prisma’s magazines had
printed something scurrilous about Gérard, Later that same year, Guillaume
was caught in a heroin deal. His mother, Elisabeth, attended court but
Gérard was away filming. Guillaume was sent to jail, serving three months.
His father came to visit him just once in prison. “I’d rather he hadn’t come
to see me there,” the son said.
Guillaume had been banned from driving in 1995, when he was out illegally on
his motorbike, passing through the St Cloud tunnel in Paris just as a
suitcase fell from a car ahead of him into the path of his bike. He crashed
and badly damaged his leg. Over the next eight years, he would face a series
of operations to try to correct the leg, and later claimed to have
contracted a hospital “superbug” during one stay for surgery. The leg became
so badly infected, he would say, that he lived in constant pain. In 2003 he
decided to have the leg amputated. But perhaps a superbug was not to blame.
The Sunday Times Magazine was told that Guillaume missed several stages of
the treatment to his leg and continued to deplete his health with drink and
drug abuse, and it was this that put his leg injury beyond repair.
In 1996 Guillaume told an interviewer he had looked death in the face 11
times, in three bike accidents and eight drug overdoses. He was then 25. The
interviewer noted his “cadaverous” appearance and the ever-present Gitane
dangling from his lips.
Like father, like son. Gérard is said to have survived 17 motorbike accidents
and a plane crash on the tarmac at Madrid airport. He is prone to roll up
his trouser leg to show off his scars, just as Guillaume might roll up his
trouser to reveal his prosthetic limb. It was Gérard’s own massive intake of
wine and Gitanes that led to quadruple heart-bypass surgery in the 1990s.
Guillaume appeared in French films with some consistency and had some success
— he won a French “Oscar”, a César, for his role in Les
Apprentis (The Apprentices) in 1995, and was twice nominated in other roles
— but he could not stop getting into trouble.
He was back in prison in 2001, after again driving while drunk. He had married
a would-be actress, Elise Ventre, a year earlier, but they separated shortly
after their daughter, Louise, was born. Not everyone had approved of Elise —
we were told the marriage had run into trouble because she wanted a
show-business life and was too interested in the family name and the
prospect of joining an acting dynasty. “She thought she would end up as
another Brigitte Bardot-type figure,” we were told.
We don’t know when or even how Guillaume met Réjane Tremel, as she would not
tell us, saying it was a secret between her and Guillaume that she would
always keep. The only clue was that their meeting had something to do with
art — naturally — and specifically involved a painting. “I had a lot of time
for painting a few years ago and this brought me very close to Guillaume.
That’s how our relationship started.”
In 2003 Guillaume was arrested after threatening a man with a gun at a bar in
the Normandy town of Trouville. The man insulted him in some way, apparently
saying Guillaume was wearing the same suit that night as he had been wearing
in a recent Paris Match photo. Guillaume was again given a suspended
sentence and ordered to seek counselling.
He was arrested on drunk-driving charges for the last time in June this year,
and was appealing against a three-month prison sentence when he died.After
his death, Réjane, and others, spoke of the love that bound the Depardieus,
even the father and son. That love must have been there somewhere, but it
was none too evident.
Marc-Olivier Fogiel told The Sunday Times Magazine that the book he co-wrote
with his friend in 2003, Tout Donner, was Guillaume’s love note to Gérard:
“They had a very peculiar relationship. The problem was certainly that they
loved each other too much. They would argue fiercely…” (sometimes even
physically, we were told) “…like any two people who love each
other greatly. They had an uncompromising love for each other.”
Fogiel characterised Guillaume as a man interested in experience rather than
money and said that was the reason for some of the sordid incidents he
described in the book.
“He did not believe in a balanced life. Guillaume wanted to live an
extreme life.”
The book does not seem much like a love note, more like a bomb lobbed at
Gérard.
A year before it was published, not long after Guillaume’s amputation and his
skirmish with the gun in Trouville, Gérard had given an interview to Paris
Match with the apparent intention of publicly disowning his son.
“He’s a real poet who touches me enormously, but who is very difficult,
incorrigible. At the moment we have no ties. I cut things off because I no
longer want to be the wall, or the trash bin where one dumps anything one
wants. He has tried to contact me but I don’t reply, because I think it’s
better for his mental health. We’ll see.”
Guillaume quickly retaliated with his own interview — in Le Parisien —
describing his father as “a coward, a cheater and lazy… the only person I
know who lies to his analyst. Gérard Depardieu is obsessed with the desire
to be loved and the need for money. The only thing we have in common is our
demons”. It was around this time that Gérard gave Guillaume the Rolex and
Guillaume gave his father a motorbike. They then apparently argued on the
phone and agreed to hand back the gifts.
It’s not hard to see how the book might have been conceived as a further act
of revenge. According to Guillaume, he sent the book to his father, who then
called him and said he had “flicked” through it and found it shameless.
“Well,” said Guillaume, “if he thinks I’m shameless, I sometimes find him
indecent.”
Guillaume’s view of his father came across very clearly in the book. In one
interview with Fogiel he said of Gérard: “I love him and I hate him for the
same reasons. For his impotence. For his way of fleeing life and existence,
and fighting against it at the same time. He is stupid. He is hopeless. He
surrounds himself too much with people who bring him nothing.”
Gérard would later say that Guillaume had discussed things in the book which
he would have preferred to make public in his own time. He may have been
thinking of Guillaume’s claim that his father visited wife-swapping clubs.
Guillaume said his father lied and drank too much and never confided in his
son about his personal life. “I only found out I was going to have a
half-sister on the day of her birth.”
Roxanne was born to the actress Karine Silla in 1992. “That tells you
everything. Everything. I was always presented with faits accomplis. That
was typical of how he behaved towards me.”
Gérard was said to have gone on a drinking binge when the book came out, and
delayed filming of 36 Quai des Orfèvres. The director said there were
one or two days when he was so drunk that he couldn’t stand up, but they
had to carry on filming as best they could. The director forgave him, he
said, because Gérard was someone with enormous heart.
Flori Ciuverca could not shake off the memory of her interview with Guillaume
on the film set in Bucharest and kept thinking about it in the days
afterwards. It was, she decided, the saddest interview of her whole life.
Her article appeared, filming on L’Enfance d’Icare came to an end soon after,
and the cast and crew came together one last time for the wrap party. Some
of them were drinking until dawn. Guillaume was there but seemed subdued and
quiet. He had been coughing and felt unwell, and seemed unable to shake it
off.
The next morning, Réjane called the producer, concerned now for Guillaume’s
health. He’d suffered turns before, of course, but this was the worst. He
was coughing blood and it seemed as though something was seriously wrong. He
was diabetic, perhaps already suffering from the liver disease cirrhosis.
Guillaume was taken to one specialist hospital in Romania and then another.
They seemed unable to agree on a diagnosis, seeing a shadow on his lung as
possibly either a tumour or pneumonia. He was airlifted back to Paris that
Saturday, October 11, and died of pneumonia two days later at
Raymond-Poincaré hospital, in Garches, west of Paris. There was speculation
that his weakened immune system might have been the result of an HIV/Aids
infection, but this was denied to The Sunday Times Magazine by someone close
to him.
The funeral was held at Notre-Dame church in Bougival, a short walk from
Guillaume’s home. A large crowd outside watched the service relayed on a
screen. Inside the church the mourners included Guillaume’s family, Carla
Bruni, her sister and their mother, the director Luc Besson, the actress
Monica Bellucci and her actor husband, Vincent Cassel, a politician or two,
and television hosts Marc-Olivier Fogiel and Benjamin Castaldi. They heard
Gérard speak of his son as a little prince.
Back in Bucharest, the journalist Flori Ciuverca was distressed by Guillaume’s
death and was surprised to find herself at the centre of the story as one of
the last people to speak to him. Paris Match asked for some help and she
happily gave them a photograph of Guillaume from the set of the film —
perhaps one of the last, if not the last, photograph ever taken of him.
Flori was upset to hear from the film’s producer that Gérard Depardieu was
furious to see the photograph in Paris Match — that would be the same Paris
Match to whom he was often giving interviews — and was threatening to sue
Flori for exploiting the death of his son. “He thought I had sold the
picture for thousands,” she said, “but I didn’t, I just gave it to
them. I hope he changed his mind now about suing me. I never took advantage
of his son’s death.”
On the contrary, Flori was still haunted by Gérard’s son and the things he had
said to her — the unsolicited confessions of Guillaume Depardieu. He had
seemed to her like a little boy.
A little boy, perhaps, in search of his father.
Additional reporting by Peter Allen
