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AU Financial Review
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- AU Financial Review
The sordid fall of ‘sacred monster' Gerard Depardieu
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.
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
French Actor Gérard Depardieu Found Guilty in Sexual Assault Case
French actor Gérard Depardieu was found guilty in a sexual assault case. He received an 18-month suspended sentence for groping two women on a Paris film set in 2021. The 76-year-old actor, known for roles in Cyrano de Bergerac and Green Card, had initially denied the allegations. So, here are all the details we've learned about the allegations against Depardieu and his sentence. The Oscar-nominated actor was convicted by a Paris court for sexually assaulting two women in 2021. Now, Gérard Depardieu's sentencing includes a suspended sentence of 18 months. Additionally, his name will be added to the national sex offender registry, and he has to pay a €29,000 fine. The judge has also ordered Depardieu to pay monetary compensation to his two victims. The Valley of Love star will pay damages of 15,000 euros ($17,000) to one of the victims. Meanwhile, he will pay €14,040 ($15,592), including any payment for medical consultation, to the other victim. Additionally, Depardieu was ordered to pay each victim €1,000 for secondary victimization. (via The New York Times) Reports revealed that Depardieu assaulted two women, including a 54-year-old set dresser and a 34-year-old assistant director. The incident reportedly took place during the shooting of his feature film, Les Volets Verts (The Green Shutters) in Paris. The set dresser, whom the court records refer to as Amélie, talked to the press after the verdict. She said, 'For me, this is a victory. Justice has been done.' Amélie also stood before the court and recalled how Depardieu harassed and assaulted her on the movie set. (via The Guardian) Amélie's lawyer, Carine Durrieu Diebolt, said the incident should be a stark reminder to 'end impunity for cinema artists.' She noted, 'I've heard some actors recently still supporting Depardieu. Now with this verdict, no one can say Gérard Depardieu is not a sexual predator, and that's very important. Today, on the first day of the Cannes Film Festival, I want the cinema world to think of the victims of Gérard Depardieu and to speak of those victims.' On the other hand, Gérard Depardieu's lawyer, Jérémie Assous, noted that he would appeal against the verdict. Originally reported by Arpita Adhya on The post French Actor Gérard Depardieu Found Guilty in Sexual Assault Case appeared first on Mandatory.
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
French Actor Gérard Depardieu Guilty of Sexual Assault While on Set
French actor was found guilty in a sexual assault case. He received an 18-month suspended sentence for groping two women on a Paris film set in 2021. The 76-year-old actor, known for roles in Cyrano de Bergerac and Green Card, had initially denied the allegations. So, here are all the details we've learned about the allegations against Depardieu and his sentence. The Oscar-nominated actor was convicted by a Paris court for sexually assaulting two women in 2021. Now, Gérard Depardieu's sentencing includes a suspended sentence of 18 months. Additionally, his name will be added to the national sex offender registry, and he has to pay a €29,000 fine. The judge has also ordered Depardieu to pay monetary compensation to his two victims. The Valley of Love star will pay damages of 15,000 euros ($17,000) to one of the victims. Meanwhile, he will pay €14,040 ($15,592), including any payment for medical consultation, to the other victim. Additionally, Depardieu was ordered to pay each victim €1,000 for secondary victimization. (via The New York Times) Reports revealed that Depardieu assaulted two women, including a 54-year-old set dresser and a 34-year-old assistant director. The incident reportedly took place during the shooting of his feature film, Les Volets Verts (The Green Shutters) in Paris. The set dresser, whom the court records refer to as Amélie, talked to the press after the verdict. She said, 'For me, this is a victory. Justice has been done.' Amélie also stood before the court and recalled how Depardieu harassed and assaulted her on the movie set. (via The Guardian) Amélie's lawyer, Carine Durrieu Diebolt, said the incident should be a stark reminder to 'end impunity for cinema artists.' She noted, 'I've heard some actors recently still supporting Depardieu. Now with this verdict, no one can say Gérard Depardieu is not a sexual predator, and that's very important. Today, on the first day of the Cannes Film Festival, I want the cinema world to think of the victims of Gérard Depardieu and to speak of those victims.' On the other hand, Gérard Depardieu's lawyer, Jérémie Assous, noted that he would appeal against the verdict. The post French Actor Gérard Depardieu Guilty of Sexual Assault While on Set appeared first on - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.
Telegraph
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The sordid fall of ‘sacred monster' Gérard Depardieu
For decades, Gérard 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. Now, however, his fall from grace would appear to have been established with his conviction of sexually assaulting two women on a film set in 2021. Depardieu's ability to slough off the taint of controversy will be sorely tested. If Depardieu, 76, is not France's greatest modern actor, he is certainly its most controversial. His combustible temper is legendary, and he is said to have erupted when director Jean-Paul Rappeneau told him that he may not be a credible actor to portray the struggling author Cyrano de Bergerac in 1990 on account of his own sizeable waistline. According to Rappeneau, Depardieu started yelling – 'Fat? Did you say I'm fat? I never want to hear that word again' – before getting drunk and smashing a hotel mirror. That outburst notwithstanding, he delivered a bravura performance that earned him a Best Actor Oscar nomination and won him a César. Depardieu came to be the embodiment of the French film industry, which is often seen as an artistically pure bulwark against the vulgarity of American and British blockbusters and has been frequently described as a 'sacred monster'. 'All my life I've been provocative, over the top, sometimes offensive,' Depardieu wrote in Le Figaro in October 2023. 'I often did what nobody else dared: tested limits, upended convictions and habits and, on set in between takes, in between tensions, laughed and made others laugh.' His drinking is legendary. Depardieu claimed that he could drink 14 bottles of wine a day – even after a quintuple heart bypass in 2000. So frequent is his alcohol intake that he said that he once drank a bottle of hair lotion after mistaking it for an Italian liqueur and he has been arrested several times for riding his motorcycle while over the drink-drive limit. A nadir came in 2011, when he was escorted off a flight from Paris to Dublin when he urinated in the aisle of the plane before take-off. 'I'm not a monster,' he later said. 'I'm just a man who wants to pee.' The only thing he seemed to have a bigger appetite for than food and drink was women. 'I don't run after pretty little things any more,' he said in a 2012 interview. 'They run after me.' On another occasion he said: 'My eye will roam with equal pleasure over the face of a beautiful woman as it will over the cuts of meat displayed in a butcher's shop window.' Depardieu's upbringing was tumultuous. His father was a sheet-metal worker who was both illiterate and a drunkard, while his mother was a housewife who, Depardieu would later claim, tried to abort him using knitting needles. 'It is learning to survive that I learnt to live,' he wrote in Ailleurs (Elsewhere), a book he published five years ago.'And I came out of her belly, happy to be alive.' Growing up in Châteauroux, a nondescript town in central France, Depardieu said that his family was so poor that they would eat rabbits and hedgehogs – only after having blown into the backsides of the latter to remove their spikes. The young Depardieu left school at 13 and made money by trafficking cigarettes and alcohol with American soldiers stationed at a nearby army base, while also prostituting himself to lorry drivers after realising when he was 'very young that I please homosexuals' and raiding fresh graves for jewellery and shoes. 'He was a criminal,' Depardieu's elder brother, Alain, said in a 2021 TV interview. 'But he was intelligent. He knew where to draw the line.' He went to Paris, aged 16, only because he followed a friend who was an aspiring actor. When he reached the City of Lights Depardieu was, he would write in his autobiography, 'big, ugly, broke, functionally illiterate, but otherwise okay'. It was the 1960s and Depardieu decided to give acting a go himself, with his raw talent quickly becoming obvious. After stints on stage and screen, his big breakthrough came in 1974's Les Valseuses, a comedy-drama in which he plays a wandering hoodlum. It was at that point he was hailed as 'un grand'. By the 1980s, Depardieu (known affectionately as Gégé) was the most sought-after French actor around and starred in a string of hits, including The Woman Next Door, Jean de Florette and The Last Metro. He also made inroads in Hollywood following the success of his turn in Peter Weir's Green Card, with roles in 102 Dalmatians, The Man in the Iron Mask and starring as Christopher Columbus 1492, in Ridley Scott's huge flop. Like Steven Seagal, another eccentric actor, Depardieu has a penchant for cosying up to dictators. Following a public spat with then-president François Hollande over tax, he moved to Belgium and, in 2013, was given Russian citizenship by Vladimir Putin. Having said he felt more at home living in Moscow than Paris, he also struck up rapports with the likes of Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen warlord, and Belarus's Alexander Lukashenko. Fidel Castro was a friend until his death in 2016. Relations with the Russian president only cooled after Depardieu condemned the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and described Putin's 'crazy, unacceptable excesses'. His personal conduct has been scrutinised for decades. When he was in the running for that best actor Oscar he gave a fateful interview to Time magazine, in which he said that he took part in a rapes as a child, the first of which came when he was 9. Depardieu tried to row back on the claim. 'It's outrageous at 9 years old or at any age,' he told Le Monde. 'Yes, one can say I had sexual experiences when I was very young, but a rape, never. I respect women too much.' Following the downfall of Harvey Weinstein amid the #MeToo movement in 2017, France was notable for resisting what many there saw as Anglo-Saxon hysteria and a character like Depardieu, who had skeletons in the closet, seemed immune to cancellation. That began to change in the past few years, as more than a dozen women have come forward to accuse Depardieu of sexual assault and a 2023 documentary – named Depardieu: The Fall of an Ogre – aired in which it was alleged he sexually harassed a translator and made lewd comments about a 10-year-old in North Korea. Depardieu's waxwork was removed from Paris's Musée Grevin amid an outcry over his seemingly ungallant behaviour, although Emmanuel Macron defended Depardieu shortly afterwards and declined to strip him of the Légion d'Honneur. 'I'm a great admirer of Gérard Depardieu; he's an immense actor … a genius of his art,' Macron said. 'He has made France known across the whole world. And, I say this as president and as a citizen, he makes France proud.' Which brings us to his trial. Two women – a set dresser and assistant director – who worked on the set of Les Volets Verts accused him of groping them, using sexualised language and, in one instance, suggesting he wished to rape one of them. The judge in the case found no reason not to believe the women, who are aged 34 and 54. The Depardieu trial has divided the French on generational lines, with older people seemingly more willing to overlook his flaws, and comes after a belated #MeToo reckoning that was perhaps best seen in the conviction of Dominique Pelicot, who orchestrated the mass rape of his wife, Gisèle. During his trial, Depardieu said that he had been unable to work for three years because the allegations cast such a pall over him. He also appeared unable to walk unaided, on account of his 20-plus stone weight, and slumped on an orthopaedic stool while in court. His conviction has also sent shockwaves through the French film industry as it gathers in Cannes for its annual boondoggle. Juliette Binoche, president of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival jury, was asked about her co-star in 2017's Let the Sunshine In on the Croisette shortly after the news broke on Tuesday. 'He's not a sacred monster, he's a man who lost his aura owing to facts that occurred and were looked at by a court,' she told reporters. 'He is no longer sacred, as is the case now.' More serious legal jeopardy looms on the horizon for Depardieu. In 2018, Charlotte Arnould, the daughter of one of Depardieu's friends and an actress 47 years his junior, accused him of raping her at her Paris home; in August last year prosecutors requested that the case go to trial. Depardieu has also denied her claims and said that any encounter was consensual. Despite all his woes, all is not lost for Depardieu. The 18-month prison term handed down is only a suspended sentence, while the €29,040 (£24,420) fine will not make much of a dent to a fortune that is estimated to run well into nine figures. He has also seemingly been defended in recent days by Brigitte Bardot, the legendary screen siren, who spoke out in favour of actors accused of sexual impropriety and criticised the #MeToo campaign. 'Feminism is not my thing,' Bardot told BFMTV. 'People with talent who grab a girl's buttocks are thrown into the bottom of the ditch. We could at least let them carry on living. They can't live any more.' Depardieu, for his part, was not even at the Paris court to hear the guilty verdict. Instead, he was almost 1,600 miles away on Sao Miguel, one of the Portuguese Azores islands, and starting on the road to a big-screen comeback. He has been cast in Elle regardait sans plus rien voir (She looked without seeing anything any more), by Fanny Ardant, the actress and director who is friends with Depardieu and appeared as a character witness at the trial. A love story about two women, Depardieu is the only non-Portuguese member of the cast and plays 'the magician of the island, a mysterious figure who connects the other characters', according to Ana Pinhão Moura, the producer. 'Every form of genius has something extravagant, unyielding, dangerous about it,' Ardant said in her evidence. 'He is the monster and the saint.' She added: 'Everyone can identify with the roles Gérard offered them. No one can identify with Monsieur Perfect.'
7NEWS
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- 7NEWS
Gerard Depardieu found guilty of sexual assault by French court
A Paris court has found actor Gerard Depardieu guilty of sexually assaulting two women on a film set and handed him an 18-month suspended sentence, with the judge saying he appeared not to have grasped the 'traumatic' impact of his behaviour. In the highest-profile #MeToo case to come before judges in France, Depardieu repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. His lawyer said he would appeal the court's decision. Depardieu, 76, was a towering figure in French cinema, starring in more than 200 films over five decades, including Green Card, The Last Metro and Cyrano de Bergerac. His trial marked a moment of reckoning for the #MeToo protest movement over sexual violence, which has failed to gain the same traction in France as in the United States, although there are signs that social attitudes are changing. One of the two plaintiffs, Amelie K, a set decorator now aged 54, told the court the actor had groped her all over her body as he trapped her between his legs and made explicit sexual comments on set in 2021. 'I was terrified, he was laughing,' she recounted. Depardieu, who denied sexual assault, had argued before the court that he did not consider placing a hand on a person's buttocks sexual assault and that some women were too easily shocked. Handing down his sentence, the presiding judge, Thierry Donard, said of Depardieu: 'He does not seem to have grasped either the concept of consent or the deleterious and traumatic consequences of his behaviour towards the women he assaulted.' He ordered Depardieu, who was not in court for the verdict, to be put on a list of sex offenders. Depardieu has figured prominently in the debate over the #MeToo movement in France, as he faced a growing number of sexual assault allegations that put a spotlight on how women are treated in the movie industry. Prosecutors say he should face trial in a separate rape investigation following allegations brought by actress Charlotte Arnould, 29, who said she could not bear remaining silent any longer. More than a dozen women have accused Depardieu of sexual violence, though not all have filed complaints. Depardieu has consistently denied wrongdoing. 'Never, absolutely never, have I abused a woman,' he wrote in an open letter in the daily Le Figaro newspaper in October 2023. The Depardieu trial laid bare a generational divide in France over sexism. Earlier during the investigation, a group of 50 French stars, including Carla Bruni, wife of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, denounced what they called the 'lynching' of Depardieu. Brigitte Bardot, 90, told BFM TV this week that 'those who have talent and grope a girl get thrown into the gutter'. Women's rights campaigners say they have seen a shift in attitudes in France — notably following the case of Gisele Pelicot whose ex-husband was convicted last year of inviting dozens of men to rape her after drugging her unconscious. 'It's truly a victory and a step forward. We're making progress,' Amelie K. told reporters after the verdict.
