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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Lifestyle
Hadley Freeman

Depardieu 'turned sex counsellor' for De Niro

depardieu
Gerard Depardieu and Robert De Niro. Photograph: AP/WireImage

And now for a new and, one can say with some certainty, inexhaustible regular slot on LiS called Fermez la bouche, Gérard Depardieu!

The exclamation mark might suggest delight but, in truth, it's a slot that causes LiS much pain. Never could I have foreseen that I would be forced to tell the actor from one of history's greatest films to zeep the leep. I'm talking about Green Card, of course, a movie that proved that even when performing opposite someone who appeared to have learned their lines phonetically due to difficulties with the English language, Andie MacDowell is still the worse actor. And for that, Depardieu, gratitude is due.

But as Michael Corleone found in The Godfather Part II, sometimes one must destroy the person one loves the most.

After a busy summer spent opining that Juliette Binoche is "nothing" (and he's right: Binoche might have knocked out Chocolat, but Chocolat is no Green Card), Gerry continues to share thoughts that nobody needed to hear by talking about Robert De Niro's alleged erection difficulties. This week, Depardieu recounted, for reasons that may never be clear, that in 1977 he helped De Niro with this delicate matter while they were making a film and De Niro was shooting a nude scene. According to Depardieu, he resolved De Niro's problem, which is odd because LiS would have thought that Depardieu would have had precisely the opposite effect on such matters.

But then LiS has never been particularly interested in fathoming the minds of the lesser sex. Fermez la bouche, Gérard Depardieu!

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