Alexandre Dumas played by a white actor? That's the controversial role the ubiquitous French actor Gerard Depardieu has taken on in a new film called "The Other Dumas." Dumas, author of "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "The Three Musketeers," was the grandson of a freed Haitian slave and a French nobleman, but that hasn't stopped Depardieu, France's busiest actor, from playing Dumas.
The blue-eyed, blond actor darkened his skin and donned a curly-hair wig for his starring role, triggering a heated debate in France. Depardieu called the furor over his role "ridiculous" and "unnecessary."
But France's Representative Council of Black Associations has objected to Depardieu in the role, saying black actors are not given an opportunity to play white roles in French cinema.
"It's very shocking and it is insulting," said Patrick Lozes, president of the council. "It is a way of saying that we don't have any black actors who have the talent to play Alexandre Dumas, which of course is not true. "
Dumas, who died in 1870, is one of the few national cultural figures of color in France, although many today don't know about his black ancestry.
The film's plot is also controversial, based on a disputed literary theory that Dumas' anonymous white collaborator, Auguste Maquet, should get much of the credit for the plots and drafts of Dumas' most famous works.
Dumas was often taunted for his race and once famously responded to a critic: "My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, sir, my family starts where yours ends."
