This Europe: Confessions of Depardieu

Thanks to the Pope, he has turned to Augustine to control his demons

Gerard Depardieu – teenage tearaway turned actor, turned businessman, turned friend of dictators – appeared in an unlikely new role yesterday. He gave a lecture on the "divine spirituality" of St Augustine at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.

M. Depardieu, 54, drew a packed audience to the 13th-century cathedral for a series of readings from Augustine's Confessions and a joint lecture with André Mandouze, France's foremost scholar of the saint, whose influential autobiography describes his conversion from hedonist to Christian.

France's best-known actor, celebrated for his complex private life and his doubtful friendships as much as his film career, says that yesterday's appearance was not a public conversion to religion à la Billy Graham. He insists he has always had a spiritual side, which has found a new expression since he discovered St Augustine three years ago.

M. Depardieu is planning to give a series of lectures and readings on St Augustine in churches, synagogues and mosques to share his enthusiasm for the "wisdom" and "modernity" of the 4th-century saint, who was born in North Africa. "My dream would be to read passages from St Augustine at the Wailing Wall [in Jerusalem]," he said.

Pope John Paul II first made the connection between M. Depardieu and St Augustine. The French actor had an audience with the Pope when he visited Rome for the jubilee of Christ's birth in 2000.

When the Pope saw the actor's rugged face, he said to his cardinals: "It's St Augustine. You must get him to read St Augustine." (Since this suggests that John Paul was seeing M. Depardieu's unmistakable features for the first time, a reasonable assumption to make is that the Pope, although once an actor, is no film fan.) The cardinals later told M. Depardieu that the Pope wanted him to make a film about the saint's life. He began to read the Confessions, became fascinated but decided that no film could do justice to St Augustine's power of language.

"St Augustine is about 'why?'. It's the mystery of life," M. Depardieu said in an interview with Le Monde yesterday. "I like to see people at prayer but not the fanatics, who use religion as a way of anaesthetising their grief. I like the words of St Augustine, for his power of meditation, the music of his language."

Gérard Depardieu left school at 13 and was a minor street criminal in his home town of Châteauroux in central France before being discovered as an acting talent by a Parisian producer in the early 1970s. He achieved fame in 1983, playing the doomed hunchbacked farmer in Jean de Florette. More recently, he played Obelix in the two Astérix movies.

Although his film career is still active – too active, according to some critics – he has attracted most attention in recent years for escapades such as the motorcycle crash, while over the alcohol limit, which almost took his life in 1997. He has also been criticised in France for his friendship with the Cuban President, Fidel Castro, and for his links with an Algerian businessman, Rafik Khalifa, accused by the French press of being a front for dubious elements in the Algerian military and intelligence services.

In an interview with the Catholic daily La Croix last week, M. Depardieu said that Augustine's writings had helped him to wrestle with his demons with more effect than psychoanalysis. "His sublime reflections brought me back to the depths of myself. To my own story ... I never go anywhere without his Confessions now.

"For 20 years, I've been seeing a psychiatrist. But books 10 and 11 of the Confessions are a mine of information for psychoanalysts. They answer our most intimate doubts and calm our most painful self-questioning." M. Depardieu said he was a non-practising Catholic, who had always had a sense of the "mystery" of life. When he left Châteauroux, he carried the life story of a "Russian pilgrim" in his pocket.

"I always had in me the thought, 'Jesus, have pity on me'. I was heavy with spirituality, without knowing it."

He said he had always found the Bible difficult to accept, because the role of Christ was too "blatant". "It was St Augustine who reconciled me with the Bible."