“The same violence inside”: Gérard Depardieu confides in his relationship with Barbara

With Barbara, Gérard Depardieu has surely lived his most beautiful story of friendship. In the 1980s, the passion for music brought together his two souls that no one would have imagined uniting. The actor, still little known, crossed paths with the already star singer. “When I started doing theatre. I had played Boudu saved from the waters, Les Garçons de la bande, the whole Claude Régy saga around Edward Bond and Peter Handke… One day, someone said: ‘Come on, let’s go and listen to Barbara’he told Telerama. It was at Bobino, I believe. Our first meeting. Later, we got to know each other better and we became very close, as if we had been lovers in a past life.. We started seeing each other, calling each other all the time. I had my room at her house, in Précy.” Together they wrote a show, Lily Passion.

“Their relationship? Sublime. It was incredible, the love that Barbara had for Gérard, and vice versa. Incredible. She respected him so much”, summed up Gérard Daguerre, Barbara’s pianist who played with Gérard Depardieu in the columns of Télérama. A few years ago, still marked by the death of the interpreter of the Black Eagle, the actor decided to pay tribute to him in music by singing the greatest songs of this “extraordinary woman”, as he described in the columns of La Provence, this Saturday, July 30. If the two artists had such a strong friendship, it’s because they looked a lot alike. “With Barbara, we had the same savagery, the same violence inside”remembers Gérard Depardieu, for whom the songs of his friend “had an absolutely amazing verb”. Twenty-five years after Barbara’s death, he has fond memories of their musical collaboration. “I had the chance to do an opera with her, a naive tale called Lily passion. It was amazing. I spent wonderful years”he still confided in the columns of La Provence.

Gérard Depardieu: “I had to see her the day she was hospitalized”

“I’ve never seen such enthusiasm from the people she was talking to, women throwing themselves under the car. […] We loved each other very much”, added Gérard Depardieu modestly. So much so that after his death, he was unable to listen to his songs for many years, upset. If he pays homage to him with great pleasure, Gérard Depardieu wishes to keep a large part of this special friendly relationship secret. “I won’t say anything about our secrets. Our laughter and our wounds, which were pretty much the same, will continue to be ours”he swore in the columns of Télérama, in 2018. He will never forget their last interview: “I was supposed to see her the day she was hospitalized, but I got held up. The next day I went to the hospital. I had brought her a beautiful bracelet with very dark sapphires as she liked. But it was over.”