Do we like Gérard Depardieu?
Our score: 0 out of 10. A 2025 sexual assault conviction (under appeal) sits on top of the demeaning remarks, and no verified good deeds turned up to set against it.
Born in Châteauroux on 27 December 1948, Depardieu had a rough youth marked by delinquency before he found theatre in Paris. He broke through as a violent small-time crook in Les Valseuses (1974), won a César for Le Dernier Métro, and was Oscar-nominated for Cyrano de Bergerac. Over 200 films later, he is one of France's best-known screen actors, with Hollywood turns like Green Card along the way.
In May 2025 a Paris court convicted him of sexually assaulting two women on the set of Les Volets verts in 2021. He got an 18-month suspended sentence and was put on the sex offenders list. In court he said he was “vulgar, rude, foul-mouthed” and accepted that, but denied touching anyone. He skipped the verdict and his lawyer said he would appeal.
Then there's the second case. An investigating judge ordered him to stand trial over the alleged rape and sexual assault of an actress in August 2018, and Reuters reported he has denied wrongdoing. His lawyer says the relationship was consensual and points to surveillance footage, and he said he would appeal the referral. We found no report of how that appeal went. Around 20 women have accused him of sexual assault or rape, and he denies the allegations.
The mess that blew it open was a France 2 documentary in December 2023. It showed him on a 2018 North Korea trip making obscene remarks, including about a girl who the documentary says was about ten. His family said the scene was misleadingly edited, while France Télévisions said the footage was authenticated. Quebec stripped him of the Order of Quebec over it, and in April 2026 he dropped his lawsuit over the edit.
Harm check: the reporting around him is overwhelmingly about women, not other groups, and nothing on LGBTQ+ people or the climate turned up in what we read. On women, he described Me Too as a “reign of terror”, and said he approved of a Le Figaro letter from 56 people calling the backlash against him a “lynching”. On Russia, he took citizenship from Putin in 2013, though in 2022 he called Putin's “crazy, unacceptable excesses” out and urged negotiations.
The good stuff is thin. There's the filmography and the awards, and plenty of colleagues were willing to publicly defend him in 2023. No verified charity work or acts of kindness turned up in reputable sources, and that's honestly the whole list. We also couldn't confirm reliable details on his recent projects.