Depardieu to play Strauss-Kahn

The star will team up with Isabelle Adjani as Strauss-Kahn’s wife, Anne Sinclair, in a biopic about last year’s scandal

GERARD Depardieu has been cast as Dominique Strauss-Kahn in a new Hollywood film about last year’s scandal that ruined DSK’s chances of the French presidency.

Isabelle Adjani is lined up to play DSK’s long-suffering wife, former TV journalist Anne Sinclair.

Sinclair stood by Strauss-Kahn, despite him admitting sex with a hotel chambermaid, which he said was consensual. The woman had pressed rape charges, but the case was dropped after her trustworthiness was discredited.

Filming is expected to start this summer, with direction by Abel Ferrara, known for such hard-hitting and controversial independent films as The Driller Killer (1979) and Bad Lieutenant (1992).

“It will be a film about politics and sex, with Depardieu and Adjani,” he told Le Monde, adding that it would be filmed in Paris, New York and Washington.

On the choice of Depardieu for the lead role, he said he had met the actor in Deauville last year and thought he was “brilliant”. “He thinks, he feels things, he is totally present. He is everything a filmmaker could ask for from an actor,” he said.

The film will be based on news reports from the time and his own sources, Ferrara said.

Photo: Georges Biard