The prolific actor, best known to American audiences as the French guy in Green Card and one of the Musketeers in the Leo swashbuckler The Man in the Iron Mask, was filming scenes for an upcoming comedy when he experienced chest pains and checked himself into Foch Hospital in suburban Paris, his agency said.
After a battery of medical tests, doctors decided to perform the bypass on the hulking French star, but the operation was said to have been precautionary and not an emergency.
"There was no alternative treatment," Doctor Gilles Dreyfus, who conducted the six-hour operation, said, adding that Depardieu would spend at least a week in the hospital to recuperate. The 51-year-old thesp is expected to recover fully.
Depardieu got his start playing minor roles in such foreign flicks as Alain Resnais' Stavisky before gaining international acclaim as an aimless thug in 1974's Going Places--a film the actor said he could relate to, given his own troubled youth.
Since then, the genial giant has gone on to become one of the reigning stars of Euro cinema, with over 100 films to his credit. His greatest hits inlcude Germinal, Jean De Florette, The Return of Martin Guerre and Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900.
In 1990, he won a Cesar--the French Oscar--and was nominated for an Academy Award for his witty performance in Cyrano de Bergerac.
His next big-screen appearance will be this Thanksgiving in the live-action Disney sequel, 102 Dalmatians.