'It's always serious when you cook. It's a pleasure. The time goes by very fast. It's like the act of love.' God bless the French, says Louise East, after meeting the actor, Gérard Depardieu, who has written a book on his native cuisine
W'Sens, a spanking new London restaurant, is buzzing with the curious anxiety that surrounds the famous. Women, dressed in black and toting folders, drift back and forth, looking worried. Several port-coloured men swill and gurgle and spit wine into silver buckets. Of Gérard Depardieu, actor, wine-maker and the reason we're all here, there is no sign, unless you count a stack of shiny hardback books featuring Depardieu peeling a carrot over the legend, Gérard Depardieu My Cookbook.
One of the black-clad women tells me everything is running late. Another says, absent-mindedly, "He's being a bit . . ." before tailing off. She suggests I taste Depardieu's wines. I wander to the linen-draped tables at the back of the restaurant where serried ranks of wine bottles boast names such as Confiance (Confidence), Ma Vérité (My Truth) and Spiritus Sancti.
On the back of every bottle, there's an artist's impression of Depardieu's face rendered in shades of red and purple, so the table appears to have been invaded by a miniature army of dipsomaniac Depardieus. A man from the BBC asks me if I've tried some of the Lumière; "It's nearly 14.5 per cent proof. That's practically a spirit." I laugh. He says, "I'm serious."
Finally, I spy Gérard Depardieu sitting at a corner table, mid-interview. His left leg is jiggling impatiently and every few minutes, he glances at his watch. There is little sign of the poetic and intense Cyrano de Bergerac, less still of the sexy beast whose kiss left Andie McDowell looking genuinely depleted at the end of Green Card.
When it's my turn to sit at the corner table with Gérard, he smiles briefly, then turns to his agent and asks, in French, how many more of these he has to endure. It's clearly not the time to ask him the questions currently obsessing the French press: are he and actress Carole Bouquet, his partner of nine years, still an item? Has he mended the rift with his troubled son, Guillaume, following the latter's damning memoir? Did he really call a fellow chat-show guest who criticised his cookbook a "têtê de lard"?
It is also probably not the time to tell him about my experiences with his cookbook the night before. My Cookbook is full of suggestions to "Take 24 snails, preferably from Burgundy" or "Joint one plump rabbit", but as I was limited to what was available in the local shops, I opted to make bouillabaisse. The recipe suggested a cooking time of 40-plus minutes at a "fairly high heat", which I cut to half an hour at a simmer. Even so the resulting fish stew was an over-cooked, yellow pulp. In fairness to Depardieu, leafing through recipes for navarin of lamb and pot-au-feu was dreamily satisfying. Once you have sourced, say, "a calf's head, boned, with the tongue and brain", the recipes look both simple to make and delicious to eat. Unlike Cameron Diaz and Bruce Willis, celebrities who have strayed into the restaurant business, Depardieu is the real thing; a passionate cook, who grows his own vegetables, owns a couple of restaurants and likes nothing better than to make wine at one of his many vineyards.
Good food, he says, is "re-finding the taste of something you used to eat. Strawberries, abricots, they don't have the same taste now." Eating is "like a communion".
MOST of Depardieu's sentences start off in English, and at some point, wander into French. "Before," he says, "I remember my grandmother sit and gave it to eat to the earth . . ." On listening back to the interview tape, I realise what he said was "my grandmother shit . . ." - a complaint about modern fertilisers.
Mentioning the recipe for calf's head, I ask him if there is anything he will not eat. No, he says, he loves everything. Even McDonald's, I ask, and suddenly he is animated. "No! I will not eat McDonalds," he pauses. "But I remember when I was on an American base when I was 13 years old, and it was wonder-fool, the hamburg-air. With ketchup, with onions, with moutarde," and he sketches out an imaginary burger.
"Sometimes when I go to New York, I still love to 'ave the hot dog. But even that is not the same taste. The hot dog is stupide now." He laughs uproariously and puts on an American accent. "Saucisse, forget it."
Talking about fast food has animated Gérard Depardieu. From here on in, his sentences end in a Mutley-like wheeze of laughter. He performs vivid little mimes to illustrate his anecdotes: Gérard peering over a garden wall to watch a girl who doesn't fancy him; Gérard squabbling with his brother over who gets most food at the dinner table.
I ask him when he started to cook seriously, and he replies: "I don't know what seriously means. It's always serious when you cook. It's a pleasure, the time goes very fast. It's like the act of love." I hesitantly bring up my failed bouillabaisse, but his enthusiasm washes straight over it. "Ah, bouillabaisse is very good, yes. With good fish, bouillabaisse is perfect, but take Italy, the cuisine of Italy is wonder-fool. Polenta, ragout . . ."
Growing up in a dreary town in the centre of France, the six Depardieu children ate meat at the start of the month only, mostly horsemeat, rabbit or lights, cooked into stews by their father, Dédé. Depardieu would gaze at his father's plate until Dédé exploded. "He would say, 'you want it? Take it. I work. I have nothing, I eat nothing. But take it.' And it was very good," Depardieu laughs noiselessly. "I would say to him, how do you do that? I want to do that. Eating is a very important form of communication."
From an early age, Depardieu had a healthy respect for meat. "I used to go to the local abattoir to get blood to make fish bait. It was just a provincial abattoir and there was no violence, they just took a pistol and Boom! It is very impressive, a bolt through the head," he muses. "Now, though, the animals have to wait and wait. You can see it in their eyes, they can smell what's coming and they are full of fear, you know? That I don't like."
The young Depardieu did not look as though he would amount to much. He sold stolen cigarettes, lived with two prostitutes (subsequently name-checked in the semi-autobiographical Green Card) and got into scraps on the street.
Only when a friend moved to Paris to try his hand at stage school, did Depardieu discover acting. Now though, with an overly-prolific 150 films under his belt, Depardieu appears to have lost respect for acting. Although a private jet is waiting to ensure he will be on a French film set at 7am the next day, he says dismissively: "Acting is nothing. People become actors like that," he snaps his fingers. "To be or not to be an actor, I don't care. I did it because they want me, and they pay me, but I never had an ambition to be an actor. I am ambitious to live."
Wine-making is a greater passion. Since buying a couple of hectares near Anjou in 1989, his stated profession on his passport is "Acteur/vigneron". Château de Tigné now puts out over a million bottles a year, but the wines we tasted at W'Sens, with names seemingly inspired by Jackie Collins novels are a new departure. Created in conjunction with a French businessman, Bernard Magrez, they hail from France, Spain, Portugal, Morocco and Argentina, and are the product of tiny vineyards.
"It's like Jean de Florette, you know? I don't like industrial wine. I like the culture, the country where the wines come from, the terroir. I like to speak with the men who sell the grapes. I took the men who have just three hectares or four hectares, and I said, you still make wine, but I will be behind you." In other words, Depardieu is becoming more entrepreneur than actor or wine-maker. Apart from the wine and the cookbook, Depardieu also wants to open international branches of his Paris restaurant, La Fontaine Gaillon, whose head chef, Laurent Audiot, co-wrote My Cookbook.
ASKED where he lives, Depardieu reels off Paris, followed by Cambodia, China, Montreal, Italy. ". . . And then in December, I am in Africa to make surgery on children who have cleft palates." For television, I ask, and he looks horrified. "No, no, no. I hate television. I even hate the movies now." His agent prompts him to tell me about his work in Cambodia, and Depardieu plunges in. "We open three clinics for three days and operate on 900 children a day." I say I don't understand what Depardieu's role is; with his energy and self-belief, it seems just possible that Depardieu is himself wielding a scalpel. "I did it, I did it," Depardieu keeps repeating. "His involvement is to alert the rest of the world," says his agent.
Depardieu looks cross and says again. "I did it. It's not a question of money. I go personally. I don't need the photographers to follow me, no, no. I hate the charity. I went to Switzerland and I said, you are rich and full of money. Full of chocolate. I ask the wives. I say, your husband, is he nice? Is he generous, huh?" Depardieu mimes the lascivious, charming look he gave to the wives of Switzerland and roars laughing. "We raise one and a half million dollars in one night in Switzerland, because I ask."
Despite his many ventures and tightly-packed schedule, Depardieu insists that he does not know what the next 10 years might hold. "I never project my life. All of my adventures come when they are ready to happen. I wait and I'm surprised. I think, 'Oh, I didn't expect that'. I like to spend more time with wine, but even that . . .' " he airily waves a hand. "For now, I don't drink."
So despite being surrounded by umpteen bottles of wine bearing pictures of his face, despite declaring in a recent interview that he routinely drinks five or six bottles of wine when "stressed", Gérard Depardieu is not drinking? He shakes his head. "Not for four weeks now. I will go for one year maybe." Why? "Because when I eat too much and drink too much, I feel my head become a little bit sad and not fast enough. I don't like that, being dependent, I like to decide for myself," he leans across the table a little. "That's because I'm not a politic man. I like to decide for myself. I hate the compromise, I hate politics and I hate the people of politics."
So he wouldn't consider running for office then? "Politics?" he laughs uproariously again. "I am not stupid enough to do that. No, no, no. Too much responsibility, too much compromise." He leans across the table, looks me straight in the eye and raises one finger. "I like to f*** when I want to f***, but I don't like to f*** all the time." He collapses into helpless laughter, shaking his head. "It's rude, but it's true, I'm not a political sex machine."