Voulez-vous poulet avec moi?

With nearly 150 films under his belt, his own vineyards in the Loire and a ravenous love of food, Gérard Depardieu enjoys a legendary appetite for life. Now, with the publication of his first cookbook, he tells Tim Atkin why he's turning his back on Hollywood for greener pastures

Gérard Depardieu is riding a large yellow motorbike through the streets of Paris with a dead chicken strapped to the passenger seat. It sounds like a scene from one of his more surreal films - Buffet Froid or Tenue de Soirée, perhaps - but France's best-known actor has been out to buy the protein for Sunday lunch, crossing the 16th arrondissement to visit a favourite butcher. 'Voilà,' he says, as his Les Deux Roues growls to a halt on the pavement, 'un poulet des Landes. Simple, mais parfait.'

It is a thing of wonder, this corn-fed chicken. Or at least it is to the 56-year-old Depardieu. In his modern, marble-topped kitchen, he handles it like a small baby: coddling it, sniffing it, admiring it. 'This is a real chicken,' he says, grunting as he stuffs its guts with tarragon and plump cloves of garlic. 'It was raised in the wild, rather than in a shed, and you can taste that in the meat. Over the next hour-and-a-half it'll cook in its own juices, but there won't be any fat. It's a very simple dish; in fact you'd have to be an idiot to screw it up. But you wait until you try it.'

In the confines of his kitchen, Depardieu seems bigger than his 5ft 11in, a large, ursine presence prowling in front of the stove. I can't get the French writer Marguerite Duras's description of him out of my head: 'a very attractive truck'. His face is familiar from the screen - those asymmetrical eyes, that curiously phallic nose, the strong, jutting jawline - but his sense of humour comes across much more forcefully in person. So is the way Depardieu makes people around him relax. Not many A-list Frenchmen greet an interviewer they've never met before with the informal 'tu', or allow a photographer to colonise their living room.

Depardieu loves meat, partly because he associates it with the prosperity his family never had. He grew up in the Le Berry region, in the dreary provincial town of Châteauroux, 160 miles to the south of Paris, where his parents, Dédé and Lilette, were so poor they could only afford meat in the first week of the month; even then it was usually horse or 'le mou' - pig's lungs. When credit was low, which was most of the time, Dédé used to send young Gérard to the butcher's. 'It was humiliating,' he remembers. 'I'd be standing there in the queue looking at my shoes and the butcher, Monsieur Chaval, would look at me and say: "Tell your father to come and pay me."'

When Monsieur Chaval was feeling less indulgent, the family ate rabbits that Dédé had been given by a friend in the local bistro, or hedgehogs he'd found in the fields. Inherited from the gypsies, Dédé's recipe for 'igloo d'hérisson' was simple enough, as Depardieu remembers: 'He used to stick a pump up its arse and blow it up so that he could remove its spikes. Then he used to gut it, clean it, wrap it in mud and throw it on the fire. After an hour or so he used to knock off the baked earth and the hedgehog was cooked.' Depardieu says the result was delicious, although he admits it's been a while since he ate hedgehog. He remains something of an omnivore, however. Filming around the world, he's eaten monkey's brains, tiger penis soup, breast of lion and, in China, a 'type of meatball that looked like shit. Everyone else was eating it,' he laughs, 'so I thought it would be rude to say no. It wasn't that bad, you know.'

It is hard to imagine a more enthusiastic carnivore than Depardieu. Unlike most rural Frenchmen, he says he has no interest in hunting, but he's always been fascinated by the sights and smells of abattoirs, ever since he paid a visit to the Châteauroux slaughterhouse to ask for blood to mix with oats as bait on one of his frequent fishing trips. In those days, abattoirs were a long way from the industrialised killing machines they are today. 'They didn't use a stun gun; they used to hit the animals with a pickaxe. Poff! It was horrible in many ways.' Even as a child, Depardieu says that he could smell the fear in the air. 'They used to bring the animals to the abattoir the night before and do the killing in the morning, so that they were a little less stressed. But the animals could still smell what was going on. Sometimes I saw men torture the animals out of boredom. Even today, I can't erase those images from my mind.'

Maybe that's why Depardieu takes a more humane approach to killing livestock. 'I learnt how to slaughter animals from the peasants in Châteauroux and I still do it when I go to visit friends who live in the countryside.' It may be of little comfort to vegetarians, but at least the animals die with the poetry of that mellifluous French voice in their ears. 'Before killing something I always talk to it,' he says, sounding like a Gallic Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. 'An animal that's been caressed before it's killed dies peacefully and its muscles don't contract with adrenalin. If an animal is slaughtered in a stress-free way it tastes better.'

When he left school at the age of 13, with little beyond a certificat d'études and a dislike of authority, Depardieu briefly dreamt of becoming a butcher. Instead, he got a job as an assistant pastry cook in a bakery. 'I loved working at night, because it was mysterious, and at six o'clock in the morning my boss sent me off to deliver to the local hotels.' Depardieu was fired a few days later when the baker received a phone call from a hotelier saying that his order was incomplete. 'I'd given some of the food to a bunch of tramps,' he says.

His next job was at the Centre-Presse printing plant, where he liked the smell of the ink and the company of his fellow workers more than the work. In the evenings, Depardieu began to drift into a well-chronicled life of delinquency and petty crime. There was a Nato base near Châteauroux and Depardieu made friends with some of the GIs who were stationed there, following them into bars and strip joints. According to his American biographer, Paul Chutkow, Depardieu took up boxing - the legacy is evident in his broken-nosed features, his biceps and his broad, muscular chest - and became a handy sparring partner. On the streets, he put his new skills to good use. 'In those bars and clubs there was always someone looking for trouble,' he told Chutkow, 'and if you frequented this milieu, brawls were unavoidable.'

Worse was to come. Depardieu moved in with two prostitutes, Irène and Michèle (who were later mentioned on screen by Georges Fauré, the semi-autobiographical character that Depardieu plays in Green Card), and started to sell stolen booze, cigarettes and petrol. Despite what some interviewers have claimed - and it's a legend that Depardieu has been known to embroider - he never went to prison, although he did spend a few nights in the local police cells and was put on probation at one point. His son Guillaume has done far more outrageous things, going to prison for a year for a drug-related offence in the early Nineties, an experience he has recently chronicled in an all-too-honest book, Tout Donner (2004), which has strained the relationship between the two of them.

Bored of Châteauroux, Depardieu spent a summer as a beach boy at Cap d'Antibes on the French Riviera (not far from Cannes, as it happens). Reluctantly, he went back to Le Berry, where he made a new friend, Michel Pilorgé, who was to change his life. When Pilorgé went to Paris to study acting in 1965, Depardieu followed him on a whim. He tagged along to an acting class and discovered that he had a talent for mimicry and improvisation. Depardieu's promise was later recognised by a legendary teacher called Jean-Laurent Cochet, who enabled him to overcome a childhood speech defect with the help of a therapist and turned him into a classically trained actor.

Les Valseuses (1974) was not Depardieu's first film (even his biggest fans are unlikely to have seen Le Beatnik et Le Minet, released in 1967), but it was the one that made his name. Playing a randy delinquent whose personality wasn't too far removed from his Châteauroux past, Depardieu was hailed as 'the revelation of the year' by Le Monde. The film, which seems pretty tame today, was a succès de scandale; the Catholic Church tried to ban it and French feminists decried it as 'phallocratique'.

Depardieu went on to become France's greatest screen actor, greater than Jean Gabin and Jean-Paul Belmondo. To date, he has featured in nearly 150 films, at a rate of more than three a year. He has been directed by some of the most famous names in cinema, from François Truffaut to Bernardo Bertolucci, Alain Resnais to Peter Weir, Ridley Scott to Andrzej Wajda, and appeared alongside many of its leading actors and actresses. And yet most of his best work was done between 1979 and 1993; since Germinal, his films have generally been a disappointment, more Crime Spree (2003), 102 Dalmatians (2000) and Bimboland (1998) than Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), Jean de Florette (1986) and Le Dernier Métro (1980). John Updike's famous poetic lament ('I think that I shall never view/A French film without Depardieu') may still be valid in France, but most of his more recent performances haven't crossed the Channel, let alone the Atlantic. Even Depardieu dismisses some of them as 'grosse merde'.

So why does he continue to act? In the past year alone he has made five films (partly, rumour has it in France, because he needs the money to fund a costly business venture in Cuba). But maybe there's something more fundamental about this compulsion to work, this need for constant activity. His wife, Elisabeth, from whom he has been separated since the mid-1990s, attributes it to a lonely childhood. 'Gérard needs to be loved all the time,' she has said, 'and loved totally. He always has inside him the root of a lack of love, which makes him work and work and work ... he makes terrible demands on himself.'

Those demands have begun to exact a physical price. Depardieu had a quintuple bypass operation in July 2000 and has been advised to slow down by his doctors. The way he tells the story, he hadn't been feeling well for a month and decided to ride to the hospital on his motorbike for some tests. 'They showed me my heart on a screen and it looked as if it was surrounded by a crown of thorns. I said, "Et alors? Can I go home now?" and they said, "It's serious, we'll have to operate."' Three weeks later, Depardieu was back on a film set.

His famously gargantuan appetite doesn't seem to have changed much since. Friends say he has switched from unfiltered to filtered Gitanes and smokes less than he used to, but his diet is much the same. 'What's the point of changing what I eat?' he asks. And what about his legendary wine consumption? 'It depends. When I'm stressed, I still drink five or six bottles of wine a day.' And when he's relaxed? 'Three or four, but I'm trying to cut down. You think alcohol calms you down, but you become addicted to it.' As the son of an alcoholic, who once saw his father lying outside the school gates with his head in the gutter, he delivers the words with sincerity. These days, he says, he spits out the occasional wine at tastings, but still loves drinking. 'I'm happy with very little on this earth, but I do like to have a lot in my glass.' French filmgoers might object, as no doubt will the French film industry, but Depardieu has decided to reduce his commitments. 'I'm planning to do one film a year from now on,' he says. 'In fact, I've already cancelled two or three projects.'

Depardieu's passport has long described his profession as 'acteur/vigneron' and he intends to concentrate on the second part of his double life. 'I want to get more involved with the vineyards I have all over the world and to spend more time with the people who work in them. You need to be there to make yourself understood; you can't just tell people what to do from the end of a telephone line. My unrealised ambition is to tend my vines, produce wine and work like an artisan. I dream of rediscovering the old traditions and customs of wine growing, not necessarily to deny the technology which we have today, but to harness it and work in harmony with nature.'

I tell him that it's all rather reminiscent of the scene in Jean de Florette when the eponymous hunchback moves to the country to 'cultivate something authentic'. 'Mais bien sûr,' says Depardieu, lunging across the table to grasp my arm. 'What Jean de Florette calls authenticity is really two things: personal growth and what you plant in the soil, be it radishes, apple trees or grapes. Authenticity is the ability to listen to what nature tells us. Listening isn't the same thing as never making a mistake, but the important thing is to learn.'

Depardieu has been seriously involved with vineyards since 1989, when he bought the 13th century Château de Tigné near Angers in the Loire Valley, although he had made wine in Burgundy and in Condrieu, in the northern Rhône, before that. Tigné has expanded over the years and now covers nearly 170 acres, yielding 1m bottles a year. It produces a number of wines, including a Cuvée Cyrano red named after the role that saw Depardieu nominated for an Oscar. Tigné is not one of the Loire's most celebrated properties, but in recent years the quality of its wines has improved considerably, largely thanks to Depardieu's investments in the vineyard and cellar.

Since 2001, Depardieu has also been joint-owner of a company called La Clé du Terroir (the 'Key to the Soil' is an approximate English translation) with an ultra-smooth Bordeaux-based businessman called Bernard Magrez. The two partners are about to release seven wines under the Gérard Depardieu label from a variety of sources, including Spain, Bordeaux, the Languedoc and Argentina. I haven't tasted the wines yet - they are being shown for the first time in London later this month - but the names sound like recruitment films for the Catholic Church: Confiance, Ma Vérité, Le Bien Décidé, Référence, Sine Nomine, Spiritus Sancti and Mi Diferencia.

Wine is what interests Depardieu most in life. He is more than happy to discuss the tiniest details of fermentation technique, the slightest nuance of the Austrian Grüner Veltliner we drink with lunch, but move him on to the subject of films and he begins to fidget and look bored. 'I'd rather spend my time with grape growers than actors. In the film industry, all the money is focused on television and the stupidity of American cinema. There are fewer and fewer "films d'auteur" made by people like Ken Loach or Claude Chabrol. The cinema is dead; it's finished. Who goes to the movies now? It's children. People who are 30 would rather sit at home in front of the telly.'

If Depardieu has anything to do with it, he would rather see them standing in front of a stove. At the moment, he is promoting the English edition of Gérard Depardieu: My Cookbook, written with Laurent Audiot, the chef at La Fontaine Gaillon, one of two restaurants that Depardieu owns in Paris's second arrondissement. The book was originally published in Germany, of all places, where it sold 40,000 copies. The French edition came out in April and is doing well, despite (or possibly because of) Depardieu's drunken appearance on a French television show, where he called a guest who criticised the book a 'moron' and a 'dickhead'.

The book contains 135 largely traditional French recipes, including bouillabaisse, quiche Lorraine, gratin dauphinois and the dish Depardieu says he often eats for breakfast when he's in the Loire Valley, lapin en gelée (rabbit in jelly). There's also a sprinkling of Italian recipes - Depardieu's favourite cuisine is Italian, not French - and one for sauerkraut, possibly as a sop to the German market. It's not exactly nouvelle cuisine ...

Depardieu says people worry more about their weight than they do about eating good food. His own bulk fluctuates considerably, depending on whether he's dieting or not. When he played Christopher Columbus in 1492, he was trim for the role; in La Dernière Femme, on the other hand, the scales hit 18∫st. I didn't ask, but my guess is that these days, with a stomach that is more beach ball than six pack, Depardieu is some way from his fighting weight. 'In 10 years, I have lost over 45 stone,' he says. 'I gain weight and lose it again in inevitable cycles.'

The recipes in My Cookbook are simple and easy to follow - no over-complicated River Café nonsense here. 'Cooking,' says Depardieu, 'is not difficult. Everyone has taste, even if they don't realise it. Even if you're not a great chef, there's nothing to stop you understanding the difference between what tastes good and what doesn't. That's what's so terrible about the industrialisation of agriculture and the food chain. There are children growing up today who don't know what a lamb, a pig or a rabbit looks like.' Depardieu tells me a story about Jamie Lee Curtis coming to visit him with her daughter at the Château de Tigné. 'There was a cherry tree in the garden and the little girl did not know what it was. She thought that cherries grew in a punnet.'

In many ways the most interesting part of the book is the introduction, entitled 'My Cooking', in which Depardieu talks candidly to writer Karen Howes about his approach to food: about his need to touch it with his bare hands, preferring to dispense with a knife and fork if he can; about his childhood (give or take the story about the hedgehogs); about his love of markets and fresh produce; about the urge to share food with other people. Depardieu says that he always felt the need 'to feed others', a statement that is borne out by the accounts of enormous meals he has cooked on film sets. Today, he's roasting a chicken for The Observer's photography team and me. (His girlfriend, the actress Carole Bouquet, is elsewhere.)

The chicken has been cooking for an hour-and-a-half and Depardieu is already talking about the smells wafting through from the kitchen. He's also started singing a song from Quand J'étais Chanteur, the film he's making at the moment. 'Just smell that,' he says as he takes the lid off the casserole dish, pointing at the chicken like a magician revealing a dove beneath a top hat. He slices off a piece of breast and offers it to me skewered on the end of a knife. 'Here, taste it. You see the way the tarragon dominates, despite all that garlic?

Tarragon is a very aromatic herb, so you have to be careful how much you include. Try it with one of these potatoes; they're called La Belle de Frontannais. My daughter Julie grew them in her garden in Bougival.'

I ask if he and Carole Bouquet like the same dishes. 'Not really,' he says. 'She's got a gluten allergy, so we often eat different things.' (It's certainly hard to imagine the svelte Chanel model eating lapin en gelée for breakfast.) 'But she's a very good cook.'

I may have started a train of thought, because Depardieu wants to talk about food and sensuality. 'That's what cookery all comes down to. After a good meal and a bottle of wine, there's nothing better than making love with someone you love and slowly slipping into a doze in their arms.' He downs the last of the wine and looks me in the face. 'Voilà. C'est fini. A small work of art. Simple, mais parfait.'

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