Being seen in two movies at one time is nothing new for Gerard Depardieu. In 20 years he’s made about 70 films, has won just about every golden lion and zinc zebra on the international film circuit and has been credited with saving the French film industry. Thank goodness he doesn’t need to save the U.S. movie business, because his first American feature, Green Card, directed by Peter Weir (“Dead Poets Society”), is a sweetly innocuous affair that calls upon little more than the cuddly side of this Gallic grizzly. As an offbeat immigrant who marries an American (exquisite Andie MacDowell) to get his residency permit, Depardieu is all too adorable. This is a movie that melts on your eyes without reaching your brain. His other current release, Cyrano de Bergerac, is a different casserole entirely. Depardieu was born to play the hero of Edmond Rostand’s eternal warhorse. As the 17th-century soldier-poet with the big nose and bigger heart, Depardieu is stupendous–fierce, funny, grandiloquent, sardonic, sensual, tender. And there’s a Roxane (stunning Anne Brochet) who for once doesn’t seem like a liberal arts major. Depardieu and director Jean-Paul Rappeneau have made all future “Cyranos” superfluous–at least until Kurosawa makes a samurai version.

The 42-year-old Depardieu’s own story would make one of his best movies. One of six children of illiterate parents (his father was an alcoholic who lost his job as a sheet-metal worker), Depardieu left home as a husky 12-year-old. “I made my own education in the street,” he says. There he majored in the black market, dealing and stealing “American cars, cigarettes, radios, a little of everything.” Not even into his teens, he spent three weeks in jail. “They wanted to put me in reform school, but that required a release from my parents and happily they did not want to sign one.” Pause. “I’m not sure if they didn’t sign because they didn’t know how to write.”

He became a real French easy rider, crisscrossing the country, working at jobs like beach boy on the Cote d’Azur, door-to-door con man and amateur boxer. During one stretch before he was 15 he lost his ability to speak. “I didn’t know how to talk in front of certain people. With riffraff, people from my own world, I could talk the language of the street. But it wasn’t possible to have normal conversations.” A friend steered him to an acting class in Paris, and suddenly he was learning the great French plays of Racine, Moliere, Marivaux. “I learned how to speak again with the classic texts, in prose and verse,” he says. In an amazing metamorphosis the tongue-tied street kid became a stage actor by the time he was 17 and at 21 was making movies.

Like Robert De Niro in the United States, Depardieu was something new. He galvanized the post-New-Wave French film in such movies as Bertrand Blier’s 1974 “Going Places,” which brought him international fame as a tough, amoral drifter–a role right out of his own life. Like De Niro he’s played a staggering variety of parts: killer, cop, transvestite, peasant, millionaire. But unlike De Niro he has also played classical and historical roles: Moliere’s Tartuffe, the sculptor Rodin in “Camille Claudel,” the doomed 1789 revolutionary in “Danton.” With his shaggy mane, busted beak, lantern jaw, hulking but expressive body, he looks like the quintessential French actor as drawn in whirlwind strokes by Daumier.

Known as a pussycat who can mutate into a tiger on the set, Depardieu loves directors who don’t “just hand you a script, who are not just directors but auteurs, who develop a story, an idea. They are people who dream of a story, and I try to find the hook for communicating this dream.” In addition to Blier, Francois Truffaut and Bernardo Bertolucci, he loves the work of the Americans Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Francis Coppola. “One is not just an actor in their films. There is a great collaboration between Scorsese and De Niro. A couple like that is magic in the cinema, a pair of creators–you no longer know who is who. For an actor, that is the most beautiful thing that exists.”