“Gérard told me that I would become a great actress”

“Thank you, Kate, for your freshness, for your look, for your pretty smile and your laugh, for your listening. I was very happy to be your father for a while.” Once more, Katherine Heigl smiles and rereads the little message from Gérard Depardieu. She carries like a talisman the notebook where the great actor, whom America has admired since “Green Card”, traced his lines for her, his co-star in “My Father, the Hero,” the American remake by Steve Miner, which comes out in Paris on 22 June. It is the third film of this young, very wise person who, already established in a long career as a child and junior model, does not allow herself to become intoxicated with her success. Accordingly, Mama keeps watch.

Nancy Heigl specifies straightaway her conditions: “My husband Paul and I are anxious that her studies go hand-in-hand with modeling and films. We don’t compromise at all on the subject and Kate accepts that with no problem. She must finish high school in three years.” Effectively, in New Canaan, a small city in Connecticut located one hour from New York, where she lives with her parents, Katherine is ending her first year of high school. She intends to enter college like her sister Meg, 18, and her brother, John, 25.

“I am,” she asserts, “determined and obstinate. And I am perfectly happy. I have understanding, tremendous parents. Total independence hardly interests me. I want to take advantage of my family and my home as much as possible. My family is more important than films or modeling, because they’re my refuge.”

Nancy Heigl has become her daughter’s friend while remaining her mother. “Perhaps I protect her more than anyone else would,” she confides. “But you know, I lost a 16-year-old son in a car accident. So…I know how fragile children are. Kate understands it very well, because she loved Jason so much and she hasn’t forgotten him. She has earned a lot of money, there’s no question, for example, that she’ll have a car before she’s 18.”