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Note:  This article translated from the French by myself with the aid of a machine translator.  Any awkwardness or errors can be blamed solely on me!  Ginny

From their first contact, Gérard talked to Paul Chutkow "like a buddy from childhood".  When he got ready to film Green Card, his first American movie, he told him what he had not yet confided: his childhood, his provincial adolescence, his years of training, his doubts along the way.  An exceptional book is born of these cordial confessions: Depardieu, that appears simultaneously this week in America from Alfred A. Knopp and in France in the Belfonds editions.  "Paris Match " publishes exclusive excerpts of this biography that illuminates the president of the next Césars ceremony [French Academy Awards], of which three movies - Colonel Chabert, by Yves Angelo, My Father, the Hero, by Steve Miner, and "A Pure Formality", by Guiseppe Tornatore - are going to dominate in these next months.  (Below the first extract begins . . . )

In 1957 - Gérard is 8 years old - Châteauroux was not one city but two, endowed with two languages, two cultures, two savings, two currencies and two very different mentalities. The contingent of four thousand men has reached twelve thousand, to which are added about three thousand wives and American children.

If the dance allows the girls to step over the demarcation line between the two communities, Gérard clears it with a jump. He and Alain [his older brother] are not content anymore to observe the Americans from afar, they join them. They slip into the bars, drink milkshakes and eat some hamburgers at Joe's from Maine. Long before they are teenagers, Alain and Gérard imitate the GIs and what they see in American movies. They wear T-shirts and Levis, listen to jazz, learn the slang words.  They have some dollars in their pockets. "Châteauroux was hundred percent Americanized and we were too," says Alain.  "There was a land of baseball and of the American music. We dressed completely like the Americans."

During their wanderings about town, in city or at the military base, in the middle of the GIs or at Joe from Maine's, the Depardieu brother enjoy a special stature: they are at the same time buddies, mascots, interpreters and mediators. Especially Gérard. At home he feels alone, on the side-lines; at the school, he gets bored, is not at ease. He's already looking for a family to suit his own tastes. "I was part of that that one calls the only children, and during my youth, what I consider to be the first half of my life, I wanted to redo my family.  I always dreamed to have my own family and a lot of children."

Alain pursued his studies and took care of his appearance: he was so often in blazer and tie that his brother and his sister nickname him "the Snob".  Alain hopes to go to the high school.  At 8-9 years old, Gérard doesn't think farther than the dinner and the nightly jaunt out. He is strong for his age, but didn't steal his nickname of Pétarou [firecracker]; in his district, he is always the terrifying child.  Only, he becomes now, more daring, in order to surprise his schoolmates. If he slips onto the base to roller-skate or go bowling, he also succeeds in reaching the P.X. : "I entered with adult Americans, from whom I bought their ration cards. They had some for all their things. I told them: 'You don't drink, you don't smoke, I'll buy your card.' I was very young. It was my little deal." He resells the whisky or cigarettes [that he gets with the ration cards] to the French to earn money to pay for his jeans, his T-shirts, his burgers and his French fries.

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