For decades, Gerard Depardieu seemed able to shrug off any scandal. From intoxicated motorcycle crashes to friendships with despots and being bundled off a flight for drunkenly urinating in the cabin, nothing seemed to derail France’s most famous actor and bon vivant.
The rotund film star was, to generations of Frenchmen and women, truly a larger-than-life hero with a boundless appetite and no interest in being bound by society’s mores. The apparent charm of his excesses – combined with his performances in more than 250 films, including The Woman Next Door and Cyrano de Bergerac – meant that many of his compatriots were eating out of the palm of his meaty paw.
