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Note:  This article was translated from the French with the aid of a machine translator.  I regret any awkwardness or errors!  Thanks to Stacy for her help, too!  Ginny

"It is not necessary to play. "Acting " is not necessary.  It is necessary to be. People call that instinct, me I would rather say it's a gift. It is necessary to try to capture the maximum of elements outside oneself and to put them in the flesh... It is necessary to have the humility to escape oneself, to have strength to allow oneself to be filled by another... I don't agree with the formula of Jouvet: "To say the words entails the feelings". It is not true. It is necessary to have the feeling before saying the words.  One can speak of hours to stars, but that won't give you the feeling! And the feeling, that is where it is at.  Sometimes that can be a bad place. Then, when you find it [that bad feeling] in the bottom of your nature, you say : "Well, look at that.  There it is..." So much the worse. One takes the heat  and doesn't say anything to anyone about it ! A certain disequilibrium - that's the way it is for an actor.…"

May 11, 1984: the most recent movie of Alain Corneau, "Fort Saganne", with Gérard Depardieu, opens the Cannes Film Festival as an "out-of-competition" entry.  May 22, 1984: "Tartuffe", the movie directed by Gérard Depardieu based on the story by Molière and produced by Jacques Lasalle closed the official section of films of "Un certain regard" at the same Cannes festival. In "Fort Saganne" it is Depardieu the popular actor, hero, intriguing, fragile, touching. Simply Depardieu... In "Tartiffe", it is Depardieu the theater actor, who likes classical texts and attaches himself to the most daring productions. This is also Depardieu... "Tartuffe" is also Depardieu, the producer of movies. That's a new role for Depardieu. And he is therefore anxious. 
 
Ten years earlier, in May 74, he appeared for the first time in a movie presented in Cannes. It was "Stavisky" by Alain Resnais with Jean-Paul Belmondo. Depardieu had only a small role, on screen for two minutes. 
 
While Belmondo stumbles before the Cannes jurors and swears he will not be caught napping again, in Paris a trio of unknowns flies off: Depardieu, Dewaere, Miou-Miou.  "Les valseuses" [Going Places], completed March 20, is just shy of a million ticket sales in Paris. In April of the same year, between "Les valseuses" and "Stavisky", another movie was made with Gérard Depardieu: "La femme du Gange" by Marguerite Duras. Another genre. The actor's other facet. 
 
But what about him?  He who ten years ago, during this spring 74, upset the face of the French movies without anyone knowing it?  He was acting in the theater. A play by Peel Handke, "La chevauchée sur le lac de Constance".   Very intellectual, big status: a production by Claude Regy, with Jeanne Moreau, Michel Lonsdale Delphine Seyrig and Sami Frey. The crème de la crème. 

One evening Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroiannis came to see the play, remembered that Bernardo Bertolucci was looking for an actor with a 'Russian' head for his film "1900", so they mention it to him... Some months later, Depardieu meets Robert de Niro, another future monster, on the set of "1900". In May 1976, two years after "Stavisky"" and "Les valseuses",  "1900" is presented at the Festival of Cannes, out-of-competition. With that he was already  "upscale". He was 27 years old. 
 
Today, in 1984, Gérard Depardieu and Robert de Niro are again in Cannes, each with a film out-of-competition.  "Fort Saganne" and "Once upon a time in America".  In the space of one decade, they have both become the acting beacons of European movies and American movies. Since "1900", De Niro shot 9 movies. Depardieu: 30 (without counting the "exceptional or friendly involvements" with Marguerite Duras, Peter Handke, etc.).  To each his own pace. 

"I need to be at least two people. I need to see double... But to shoot so many movies, it is not a therapy to heal my infirmities. It is a creative therapy insofar as this profession makes you work with your emotions, learn to channel them, learn to make creative use of even your shortcomings... But it doesn't heal anything... The madness, it is not my comfort but a permanent anguish ... My infirmity to me, it is this thirst to live, to communicate, this thirst for dialogue... What anguishes me, it is the loss of the dialogue, the return to myself... that I can't take…"

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