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.
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