MOVIES : COMMENTARY : The Accent Is on Acting : Gerard Depardieu’s success in ‘Green Card’ shows there’s still a niche--albeit small--for foreign actors in Hollywood

His lantern jaw looks like something out of the Paleolithic Era. His hair is a wayward mass of greasy strands. His nose is as unavoidable as Pinocchio’s. His bulk is positively Falstaffian.

Welcome to Hollywood’s new heartthrob--Gerard Depardieu.

In “Green Card,” Depardieu plays a rumpled French drifter who, in order to become an American citizen, enters into an arranged marriage with a yuppie-ish horticulturist, played by Andie MacDowell. Aside from the nifty premise, there’s nothing in this obvious, galumphing movie to explain its vast success except for the presence of Depardieu. For those of us who have been relishing his career in foreign language films ever since he broke through in 1974 with “Going Places,” his astonishing skills come as no great surprise. But most of the audience for “Green Card” has never seen him in a movie before. It’s his first English language film and, although he apparently made it as a lark, without any inclination to conquer Hollywood, he’s stuck with stardom just the same.

How does Depardieu’s success fit into Hollywood’s checkered history with foreign actors? And what does he provide that his stateside counterparts don’t?

In the past, of course, Hollywood has often tried to accommodate movie stars whose reputations were made abroad. The reasons for the accommodations were as much commercial as cultural.

The great influx of such foreign film stars as Emil Jannings, Charles Boyer and Maurice Chevalier into the Hollywood of the ‘20s and ‘30s represented not merely a desire on their part to vanquish Hollywood. At a time when foreign films were far more globally competitive with Hollywood than they are now, stars like these, as well as many of the artists and craftsmen they worked with, were actively courted by studio heads as a way of co-opting their international appeal and cornering the worldwide market.

Then too, the Hollywood movies of the pre-World War II era reflected an internationalism that was everywhere apparent in a society of immigrants. Pick any random movie from the ‘30s--an Astaire-Rogers musical, say, or a Lubitsch comedy--and chances are you’ll run across an Irish cop, a French headwaiter, a British twit, a German martinet, a Latin lover.

The stock company of Hollywood actors was well furnished with foreign “types,” and if the roles were often little more than caricatures, they were nevertheless beloved caricatures. An actor like Peter Lorre may not have fulfilled his genius in Hollywood but he was as cherished a fixture in Hollywood’s dreamscape as many a mega-star. These immigrant actors imparted to the movies a teeming, knockabout quality--paradoxically, an American quality.

The high profile of foreign stars in Hollywood in this period also reflected a nation whose notions of “class” were still overwhelmingly Eurocentric. Whereas an “American” American star like Jimmy Stewart might triumph with his drawling, homespun plainness, a British import like Herbert Marshall represented the pinnacle of continental manners and grace. Likewise, exoticism was largely the province of foreign performers in Hollywood, particularly the actresses. One of the reasons that stars like Garbo and Dietrich thrived in the ‘30s is because their exoticism was such an alluring antidote to the plain-Jane wholesomeness of most American movie women.

The foreignness of these actresses was essential to their appeal: It allowed them to move into territories of kink and mystery that American audiences could not easily sanction in their home-grown heroines. American female stars ranging from Janet Gaynor to Jean Arthur were recognized for their winning, maidenly, wisecracky, innocent romanticism. When that innocence was threatened, it was not infrequently some foreign dreamboat or rogue, like Valentino or Erich von Stroheim, who did the threatening. In the movies, the character of American womanhood was largely unsullied by sexual mystery. The attraction of Hollywood for foreign film stars was, and still is, intimately bound up with America’s wayward, puritan ambivalence toward sex.

The World War II era introduced a new kind of foreign film star to Hollywood--the refugee, the star without a country. While an actor like Chevalier may have come to Hollywood in the early ‘30s by choice, many of the actors who followed him during the war years did so by necessity. German actors who had fled Hitler often found themselves playing Nazis, like Conrad Veidt in “Casablanca.” Many stars, who, like Jean Gabin, were reknowned in their own country for their tragic, fatalistic personas found themselves adrift in Hollywood’s ocean of enforced happy endings. By the end of the war, many of these stars--the successes as well as the failures--returned home to reinvigorate their own film industries.

Hollywood no longer dominated the world film market; there were more international stars, like Brigitte Bardot in the ‘50s, who had never even set foot inside Hollywood. And, in any event, in the wake of the Cold War, Hollywood no longer felt so affectionate toward its foreign actors. Foreignness was played down; Americanism was played up. The feeling was, it’s OK to be foreign as long as you’re American. It’s a feeling that still persists. It’s not entirely a joke to say that Meryl Streep, with her arsenal of perfect-pitch accents, is the most popular foreign film star in America today.

Nowadays Hollywood not only once again dominates the international marketplace; it also is exposed to far fewer foreign influences than ever before. The market for foreign films in this country is at an all-time low, and that means that there is little stateside recognition for all but the most successful European film stars. There is now an entire generation of European movie star who is all but unknown to even the minuscule American art-house audience.

Is it any wonder that Hollywood doesn’t see the percentage in siphoning off these actors? It’s easier to siphon off the screenplays in which they appear. It’s no secret that an inordinate number of Hollywood hits--”Three Men and a Baby,” “Three Fugitives” among them--are simply recycled French scripts. And yet, the success of Gerard Depardieu in “Green Card” may signal a turning of the tide in Hollywood’s acceptance of the foreign film star. The few current foreign stars that we’ve had up until now--”Blade Runner’s” Rutger Hauer, “Twin Peaks’ ” Joan Chen--are a special case: They both speak English extremely well and they’ve both found their salvation in exotic cinematic mindscapes that play up their “otherness.”

But Depardieu, who speaks a kind of fractured, phonetic English, is exotic in a very different way. There is nothing mysterious about him in “Green Card.” And yet his chunky, accented oddness, just because it is so different from what we’re used to seeing in our leading men, is a kick for audiences.

Part of the reason for the dismal state of romance in American movies is that most of the male stars are action heroes first and romantic heroes second--if at all. It’s as if there was something lily-livered and feminizing about being in love. In Hollywood, action is romance. It is in this context that Depardieu saunters to success in “Green Card.” He is everything you’re not supposed to be as a Hollywood romantic lead, and yet he has all the requisite qualities too.

He’s like a cross between Charles Boyer and a water buffalo. He’s clunky yet, in his own gyroscopic way, graceful. He’s shaggy yet weirdly debonair--his shagginess is his personal style. At a fancy dress party, he may bang away at the piano keys in front of the hoi polloi, but then he hunkers down to play the classics--beautifully.

In his best French films, like “Going Places” and “Get Out Your Handkerchiefs,” Depardieu played lovelorn, unregenerate wild men. In “Green Card,” he’s a wild man defused--a cuddly, unkempt toy for women to dote on and take care of. Depardieu has the same romantic core in “Green Card” that he has in his other current outing, “Cyrano,” but the core has been gift-wrapped and beribboned. His Frenchness is exotic in a way that doesn’t threaten people, and perhaps upscale audiences now require that distance, that lack of threat in their romantic heroes. Particularly those heroes who blithely trash many of the yuppie values they hold dear.

Other foreign actors besides Depardieu are making inroads into Hollywood. Armin Mueller-Stahl, as the despicable patriarch in “The Music Box” and the upstanding patriarch in “Avalon,” gives both films a staunch, Old World gravity. Lena Olin, in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” had a frisky, sexy melancholy; in “Havana,” she was cast as an Ingrid Bergman type playing opposite Robert Redford’s pseudo-Bogie. Klaus Maria Brandauer, appearing currently in “White Fang” and “The Russia House,” seems to have carved out a Hollywood career for himself stealing movies from his higher-billed co-stars.

It’s unlikely that this trickle will gush into a torrent of foreign film actors on our screens comparable to what we had in the ‘30s and ‘40s. But the success of these actors, even in indifferent movies, is an indication of what we’ve been missing. They bring a lived-in authenticity to their roles, a sense of history and a tantalizingly different acting tradition.

It’s also possible that, at a time when the vast wave of immigration in this country is coming from Asia and the Third World, the presence of actors like Depardieu and Olin and Mueller-Stahl and Brandauer is Hollywood’s way of retreating to an earlier, less threatening, Eurocentric stance. If Hollywood isn’t quite sure what to do with an actress like Lena Olin except cast her as an Ingrid Bergman clone, that could be because she satisfies a longing in the audience for romantic, old-movie scenarios, for the swoony, explicable world of a “Casablanca.”

And if Depardieu has so far been cast in our movies as a lovable goof, that’s an indication of how Hollywood cartoonizes its wildest talents, whether foreign-born or home-grown. The biggest joke in “Green Card” is that Depardieu, by sheer force of talent, fills out the cartoon anyway. He’s a rebel who makes a jest out of his own packaging. In the midst of unbiodegradable fluff, he’s improbably touching. For the many gifted American actors struggling in routine flicks to make something out of nothing, what Depardieu does in this film is a lesson that can’t be learned too many times.

Even if the lesson comes from France.