Gérard Depardieu s sordid, troubling past is finally catching up with him
The thuggish actor who once boasted of plenty of rapes, too many to count faces fresh accusations. Will his French defenders stand by him?
Gérard Depardieu photographed in Marseille, 2018
Credit: Getty
Before Gérard Depardieu was anybody, he was a teenage rent boy and petty thief who robbed fresh graves to steal jewellery and shoes. He lifted the lid on this appalling childhood in his autobiography, That’s the Way it Was, published in 2014, which made his upbringing in the town of Châteauroux in Central France sound like the early chapters of an Émile Zola novel.
The second Lady Day: Andra Day plays Billie Holiday in Lee Daniels s film
Credit: Takashi Seida
Dir: Lee Daniels. Cast: Andra Day, Trevante Rhodes, Garrett Hedlund, Natasha Lyonne, Miss Lawrence, Rob Morgan, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Evan Ross, Tyler James Williams, Tone Bell. No cert, 130 min
The FBI couldn’t lynch Billie Holiday, but they inflicted their version of it. Their mutual antagonism began with the incendiary lyrics of Strange Fruit (“Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze…”), the breakout single she first recorded in 1939, and the authorities would breathe down her neck for the remaining 20 years she enjoyed between stardom and the grave.
Hugh Bonneville plays the irascible children s author
Credit: Thing One Limited
Dir: John Hay. Cast: Hugh Bonneville, Keeley Hawes, Geoffrey Palmer, Conleth Hill, Sam Heughan. PG cert, 99 mins
There are many stories that might be told about the legendarily tempestuous 30-year marriage of Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal. So it’s a pity that the British biopic To Olivia chose to relate one that didn’t actually happen.
This film, a Sky Cinema Originals production, has certainly not been shameless enough to fabricate the death of the Dahls’ eldest daughter, Olivia, from post-measles encephalitis in 1962. That much was real. But everything that happens afterwards has been, let’s say, creatively reshuffled. The film invents an entire timeline that isn’t true, to jerry-rig for itself a neat recovery arc about the healing power of creativity.