Guillaume Depardieu, best known, perhaps, as the eldest son of superstar Gérard Depardieu, has died of complications from pneumonia at a hospital in the Greater Paris area. He was 37.
Among Guillaume Depardieu’s credits are Alain Corneau’s period drama Tous les matins du monde (1991), playing Gérard Depardieu’s character in his youth; Pierre Salvadori’s Les Apprentis (1995), opposite François Cluzet; Leos Carax’s sexually explicit drama Pola X (1999); and, more recently, Josée Dayan’s Château en Suède (2008), a made-for-TV feature based on Françoise Sagan’s play, and co-starring Jeanne Moreau. Depardieu’s voice will shortly be heard in American movie theaters in the upcoming animated feature Fear(s) of the Dark.
Depardieu had a troubled relationship with his father, with whom he had a public falling-out in 2003. The following year, Guillaume published a tell-all autobiography accusing his father of being neglectful. (His mother was actress Elisabeth Guignot.)
“I love him and I detest him for the same reasons.” he wrote in Tout Donner. “For his impotence. For his way of fleeing life, and existence, and fighting against it at the same time. He is stupid. He is hopeless. He surrounds himself too much with people who bring him nothing.”
Some sources assert that the Depardieus had since reconciled.
A good-looking man in his youth, Guillaume Depardieu aged rather rapidly possibly as a result of hardcore drug use – for which he takes responsability in his book. In 2003, he had his right leg amputated so as to get rid of a painful bacterial infection that he’d caught at a hospital while being treated for injuries suffered in a 1996 motorcycle accident.
A few years ago, Depardieu caused a minor furor after bluntly asking a television journalist if the Grand Journal set was “stinking of shit.” Reason for he remark: then-presidential candidate Nicholas Sarkozy had been on the set prior to Depardieu’s arrival.