Depardieu still French, shock

It's official… legendary hellraiser Gerard Depardieu is still French. In an interview with 'Le Figaro' magazine,  the 64-year-old actor insisted: "I never left! I refuse to be shut in by borders, that's completely different. "I am a free man. I feel at home everywhere in Europe."

"This whole story is a big misunderstanding," he said, adding: "I love France as much as ever. It's my country."

Depardieu hit the headlines  last year when he decided to take up residency in Belgium after  President Francois Hollande's Socialist government contrived to impose a 75 per cent tax rate on annual incomes over one million euros (£860,000).

Today Depardieu is holding a giant barbecue for 200 to celebrate moving into the house he bought in 2012 in the Belgian village of Nechin, just a kilometre away from the border from France.

After buying the house in Nechin, Depardieu was granted Russian citizenship by President Vladimir Putin. The decision stirred up controversy, as have his friendships with Mr Putin and Chechnya's leader Ramzan Kadyrov.

But in recent months Depardieu has sought to play down the move, granting a series of interviews and returning to Paris this summer to shoot a film in which he plays the creator of the FIFA World Cup, Jules Rimet.

Depardieu still hit out in the interview at  Hollande's Socialist government, saying: "I don't think we can pretend that everything is going well" in France.

"People can really feel the gap between what the politicians are saying and the reality of their daily lives. This rift will eventually burst into the open, maybe during the next elections."

The actor was fined earlier this year after falling off his scooter while driving drunk in Paris. In 2011 he tried to urinate in a bottle aboard a plane as it prepared to take off from Paris for Dublin.