GÉRARD XAVIER DEPARDIEU was born on December 27, 1948, in Châteauroux, central France, the third of six children of a heavy-drinking sheet-metal worker.  His life has been profoundly affected by his emotionally-parched, penny-pinching childhood and much has been made of his bleak family life and rebel past; some of which has ended up in his films.

As a child, he overrode his desperate need for love and attention by projecting himself as a self-styled delinquent, a sort of Châteauroux Kid goes Hollywood Bad Boy.  By the time he was 12, his friends say he was "a giant" -- the size he is now (just under six foot) -- and running a profitable business trafficking black-market goods to American GIs on the army base outside town.  Although Depardieu brags that he used to take a gun to school, his old headmaster, Roger Lucas, remembers him as a chivalrous youngster who defended the smaller boys.  He was also a fearless goalkeeper for the region's junior football team.

There were no funds for secondary education and in 1963, the year Kennedy was assassinated, he left home to live briefly with a pair of prostitutes (Irène and Michèle, as featured in his first Hollywood movie Green Card) and apprentice in a print shop.  At 15, bored beyond tolerance, he hit the road Kerouac-style with his two tattoos and sharpened wits, and ended up as a plagiste on one of the Côte d' Azur's prettiest beaches, La Garoupe.

Returning briefly to Châteauroux, he bumped into an old friend, a drama student returning to Paris to continue his studies at the Théâtre Nationale Populaire and jumped train with him.  The friend, actor Michel Pilorgé, took Depardieu along to a drama class for a laugh.  The TNP has seldom seen a student with such primal instincts and naïve talent and they cautiously took this unknown quantity on for no fee.

The young Depardieu found himself on stage, though acting did not come naturally:  "It was very tough because I had no education," he says now.  "I couldn't even read the lines properly to memorize them.  I was dumb from hyper-emotion, terrified I wouldn't be able to say my words.  Everybody must have felt this tension.  Finally, whatever it was became unblocked and I passed into the light."

His first paid job was playing a bearded yob in Le Beatnik et le Minet, a short film made in Paris in 1967 (when he was 19) in which his voice had to be dubbed as his words were inaudible.  There followed years of playing the extra hood, the thug with two lines, the man with the gun, before he offended the bourgeoisie with his unforgettable role as a junvenile deliquent Bertrand Blier's 1974 shocker Les Valseuses (slang for "balls"), and became un succès fou.

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