Gérard Depardieu’s brutish onscreen brilliance can’t save a legacy in freefall

He’s faced allegations of sexual abuse from more than a dozen women and yet only last month was called ‘a great actor who makes France proud’ by President Macron. Geoffrey Macnab unpicks a cinematic scandal that goes back decades – and finds younger fans of film ready to shunt the star off screen and into permanent obscurity

Depardieu pictured at a press conference for ‘Saint Amour’ in 2016 (Getty)

Poets and thugs: Gérard Depardieu always excelled at playing both. Projecting a yearning vulnerability, the hulking French actor’s best performances invariably walked a line between brutishness and delicacy. In the words of critic David Thomson, he has “the air of a rugby player... crossed with a great violinist”.

Today, it seems crass even to discuss Depardieu’s acting, given that he is facing multiple allegations of rape and sexual assault. The 75-year-old has denied emphatically that he is a rapist or a predator, telling Le Figaro: “I have never, ever abused a woman. Hurting a woman would be like kicking my own mother in the stomach.”

This week, Parisian prosecutors dismissed a complaint by actor Hélène Darras, who claimed that he had groped and propositioned her on the set of the 2007 film Disco. The case was abandoned after exceeding the statute of limitations; a dozen other women also lodged allegations against the actor last year.