Guillaume Depardieu has died, tragically and most unexpectedly, at 37, after being hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia. Although he was probably best known as the son of Gerard Depardieu, Guillaume had established a name for himself as a film actor and leading man, as well as a provider of fodder for tabloids and gossip columnists. He made his film debut in 1974, playing the three-year-old son of the hero, played by his father, of Claude Goretta's international success The Wonderful Crook. He gave his first mature film performance seventeen years later in Alain Corneau's Tout les matins du monde ("All the Mornings of the World"), in which he played the musician Marin Marais as a young man, with his father handling the role of the older Marais. Guillaume and Gerard would repeat this doubling up act, with each appearing in two French miniseries, The Count of Monte Cristo (1998) and Les Miserables (2000), in which they took turns playing the heroes of classic works of French literature at different ends of their lives. They also appeared together, as father and son, in the 2002 Aime ton Pere (known in English as both Honor They Father and A Loving Father), as well as the French-English TV miniseries Napoleon (2002), in which neither one of them played Napoleon, thank God.
In projects independent of his father, Guillaume Deparidieu established an image as a smoldering, not always likable romantic figure, with a tendency towards brooding and fiery sexual passions. In that mold, he will probably be best remembered as the star of Pola X, Leos Carax's controversial, wild-eyed adaptation of Herman Melville's Pierre, and his most recent film to reach the United States, Jacques Rivette's period drama The Duchess of Langeais, in which, looking more than ever like an alternate-universe version of his father who had managed to control himself around the buffet table, he did his banked-fires thing with the actress Jeanne Balibar. Offscreen, it often seemed that his diet was the only thing that Depardieu was able to control. After injuring his knee in a motorcycle accident in 1995, he suffered an infection that left him in such constant pain that, in 2003, he consented to have his leg amputated. He got in trouble with the law over DUI arrests and assorted drug-related offenses, and in 2003 he was slapped with a nine-month suspended sentence and a $9,000 fine after he reportedly pulled a gun on a man in a bar who, badly misjudging his temperament, had decided to get off a couple of zingers insulting his taste in clothes. It was the business with the boom stick in the bar that caused his father to publicly disown him in an interview with Paris Match, saying of his son, ""He's a real poet who touches me enormously, but who is very difficult, incorrigible. At the moment, we have no ties. I cut things off because I no longer want to be the wall, or the trash bin where one dumps anything one wants. He has tried to contact me but I don't reply because I think that it's better for his mental health. We'll see." Guillaume was in Romania working on a new movie when he was taken ill with the virus that killed him.