The French actor Gérard Depardieu will be tried in October for the sexual assault of two women, the Paris prosecutor’s office said on Monday.

French police had questioned the 75-year-old screen veteran over the 2021 allegations earlier on Monday before releasing him.

In a separate case, Depardieu was charged with rape in 2020 and put his career on hold last autumn as allegations mounted against him.

On Monday night, the public prosecutor’s office said: “At the end of his police custody at the 3rd Judicial Police District, Gérard Depardieu was served with a summons to appear before the criminal court … for sexual assaults likely to have been committed in September 2021 to the detriment of two victims, on the set of the film [The] Green Shutters.”

Depardieu, 75, who has made more than 200 films and television series, denies any wrongdoing.

Depardieu already faces a rape charge, as well as claims of assault from more than a dozen women. He strenuously denies any wrongdoing.

“Never ever have I abused a woman,” Depardieu wrote in Le Figaro newspaper in October.

In 2020, police charged Depardieu with rape and sexual assault after the actress Charlotte Arnould alleged he raped her in 2018, when she was 22.

Another sexual assault complaint filed last year by the actress Hélène Darras, who said Depardieu groped and propositioned her during a 2007 film shoot, has been dropped for being past the statute of limitations.

Obscene comments

In December, the Spanish journalist and author Ruth Baza said she had filed a criminal complaint in her home country against Depardieu, alleging that he raped her in 1995 in Paris.

Despite the events having passed the statute of limitations, she said she decided to file her complaint in the hope that it would “help other people” to do the same.

Debate over whether to show Depardieu’s films intensified late last year after a television report showed the actor repeatedly making obscene comments in the presence of a female interpreter during a 2018 trip to North Korea.

His wax sculpture was hurriedly removed from the Musée Grévin waxwork museum in Paris and Canada’s Quebec province stripped him of its top honour.

The actress Anouk Grinberg, a co-star with Depardieu on The Green Shutters, has described how she and others on set were “treated to his salacious nonsense from morning to night”.

She told AFP: “When film producers hire Depardieu on a film, they know they are hiring an aggressor.”

Grinberg said that producers of The Green Shutters had supposedly appointed someone to deal with harassment issues but claimed the person did nothing.

In December, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, sparked uproar after he defended the actor as innocent until proven guilty and insinuated that he was the victim of a “manhunt”.

Macron said late last year: “He’s an immense actor, a genius of his art. He makes France proud.”

Mr Macron later said he should have placed more emphasis on the importance of women speaking out.

The French film industry has been accused of being slow to react to sexism or abuse in its midst, after a string of male actors and directors recently faced complaints of abuse.