“Girard Déperdie”, Jeurard Dipardiou, “Gerrard Dopardio”. Never has this so French name been pronounced with so many accents. The goat (1981) or Freinds (1983), the popular comedies of Francis Veber, have already made the actor known abroad, but nothing is comparable to the international success of Cyrano de Bergerac. It’s as if the world suddenly opened up before him. Before closing abruptly.
The film was released on March 28, 1990 in France and, the following month, Depardieu and the filmmaker Jean-Paul Rappeneau were invited everywhere in Europe, but also in Asia and America. “A Tour of the Grand Dukes”, laughs Depardieu, who presents the film in dozens of capitals. A few minutes after the start of each screening, unable to see Cyrano, the actor and his director slip away for a drink. How not to see that this Gascon disfigured by his nose, who speaks in alexandrines and fights with a sword, has become a universal hero?
In central Europe, where the iron curtain collapsed a year earlier, it is a triumph. In Poland, television films spectators moved to tears by the romanticism of a hopeless lover. The Czechs love his rantings, rendered by the best translators in the country. The actor joins in the hearts of Russians the French superstars Alain Delon and Pierre Richard. In India, where life seems so far from this so French comedy, we have rarely seen such success in the halls of Calcutta and New Delhi. Cyrano comes out in Montreal in the midst of a political crisis between Quebec separatists and Canadian federalists. At each screening, the public gives the Gascon an ovation when he throws himself into battle with his cadets: it must be said that the fleur-de-lis flag that they brandish looks furiously like that of Quebec…
Take stock of the phenomenon
Another issue arose in September 1990, during the Toronto Festival (Ontario), a sort of Canadian antechamber to the Oscars. “The presenter introduced the screening by saying, ‘Here’s the next Foreign Film Oscar'”, remembers Jean-Paul Rappeneau. Conquering the United States is the Grail of any director and the possibility for an actor to start a career there. But does Depardieu really want to settle in Hollywood, he whom Los Angeles, its highways and its artifices depress?
Cyrano is displayed, the 1er December 1990, on American screens, followed, on Christmas Eve, by Green Card, still with Depardieu, a romantic comedy by Australian Peter Weir. The latter is one of the most courted directors in Hollywood since the worldwide triumph of his Dead Poets Society (1989). Filming under his direction is an exceptional opportunity, especially since the role was tailor-made for Depardieu. He plays a “Frenchy” food lover who contracts a sham marriage with a vegan New Yorker, played by Andie MacDowell, in order to obtain this famous “green card”, the title of permanent resident in the United States that immigrants dream of.
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