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Gérard Depardieu's staggering career has created a rouge's gallery of monumental proportions.  Marianne Gray meets France's raging bull.

Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy.  Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.  It seems no role is too peculiar or formidable for Gérard Depardieu.  He's played thugs, drunks, a priest, a sado-masochist, a used-car dealer, a hunchback, a transvestite, even a man with a big nose who spouts poetry in Alexandrine verse -- all the archetypes of past and present, particularly the present.  "I always try and choose characters who represent the society I live in," he says.

He's the French De Niro, a man who can inhabit a character with uncanny, yet consummate ease.  Post-Nouvelle Vague, Depardieu has been the one constant of French cinema, its only true celebrity; a giant of European cinema both in reputation and build.

Now, at 43, with 72 films in the can, Depardieu is a sort of one-man film industry.  He has become the thinking-woman's beefcake -- the man who turned men with fat bellies and big noses into sex symbols -- as well as a hero to men of two generations.  He owns a chateau near the Loire, is a friend of François Mitterand, has been nominated for an Oscar, and is famed for his Rabelaisian appetite for food and wine.  In France he approaches the status of a sacred icon.

Leagues away from being a sanitized Hollywood star, he thrives on his rough, tough, and often plebian image -- though co-stars say he has difficulty bringing himself to do violent scenes.  "When we were shooting Les Choix des Armes," says Catherine Deneuve, "and he had to throw me against a wall, he couldn't do it.  I think the whole business of hurting somebody posed a problem for him."

But Depardieu doesn't usually have problems with his work.  His latest film, Tous Les Matins du Monde (released here in July [as All the Mornings in the World]) has won seven Césars -- the French Oscars -- including Best Film and Best Director (Alain Corneau). 

In it he slips into full seventeenth-century costume (complete with wig) to play French composer Marin Marais, who had 19 children and played viola at the court of Louis XIV at Versailles.  Since Depardieu doesn't actually play an instrument, he got his son Guillaume (who does) to play Marais as a young man.  With anyone else this would appear to be a case of overt nepotism, but Depardieu, with typical dexterity, has once again overstepped the mark -- and hit the target.  French reviewers gushed about the birth of a great actor in Depardieu's fils; and the curious have packed cinemas to see the marvel that is Gérard le Grand's little boy.

Depardieu shrugs it off, saying, "Guillaume is more handsome than I am," and gets fired up talking about "soul" and "intellectual rhythm" in his typically melodramatic and sometimes overbearing manner.  He's eager to point out that once again we get to see two Depardieus for the price of one (in the past he has acted with his wife, Elisabeth Guignot).

The first time I met Gérard Depardieu was at the Cannes Film Festival several years ago.  It was the day after he had challenged Nick Nolte -- another burly leading man -- to a drinking contest.  Having won the challenge, the Frenchman cancelled his interview on the grounds of frailty, a rejection delivered with such disarming Gallic charm that it was hard to be angry.  The concierge at the Carlton Hotel where they held the contest later told me that the two actors had come down in the life at 4am, danced naked together in the foyer, and returned to their rooms without anyone, save the surprised staff, seeing them.

This is the kind of story that accompanies Depardieu, and there are plenty more.  It doesn't matter whether they're true or not, because they suit him: the actor with the Michelin Man body is a man driven by danger, a man who savours life unbridled.  No publicist could have created the Depardieu Legend.  He tends to say and do things that create a stir and they precede him wherever he goes.  The only quiet thing about Depardieu is the silent "d" in Gérard -- and even that depends on where you are in the world.

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