Before he was an acclaimed actor, Gérard Depardieu worked as a male escort and grave robber.
The rambunctious French actor, 65, describes his wild youth in his just-released autobiography, “That’s the Way It Was,” which was excerpted in the Daily Mail on Sunday.
According to Depardieu, who grew up in the French city of Châteauroux, he started working as a male escort as a teen. “I’ve known since I was very young that I please homosexuals,” he wrote. “I would ask them for money.”
At 20, the thug in me was alive and kicking. I would rip some of them off. I would beat up some bloke and leave with all his money.
The “Green Card” star relied on the profession for money when he left home for Paris, sometimes using his fists to pry some extra cash from his unsuspecting clients.
“At 20, the thug in me was alive and kicking,” he wrote. “I would rip some of them off. I would beat up some bloke and leave with all his money.”
He also says he and another man dug up freshly buried bodies to steal jewelry and shoes.
Depardieu’s more outlandish tales don’t stop with his adolescence, in part because he has never calmed down, something he attributes to his heavy drinking.
“I’m obsessed with the racket in my body, the beating of my heart, the gurgling of my intestines, my joints cracking,” he wrote. “It’s become a phobia to the point that if I’m alone in a hotel, I must drink so as not to hear it, so as not to go mad from it. I can’t get to sleep unless I am dead drunk.”
This isn’t the first time Depardieu has told tales of his legendary drinking. In August, he told UK film magazine So Film that he drinks up to 14 bottles of wine a day.
The actor, who became a Russian citizen last year, also writes of his friendship with the country’s president, Vladamir Putin, whom he met in 2008.
“We could have both become hoodlums,” he wrote. “I think he immediately liked my hooligan side … the fact that I had occasionally been picked up off the pavement dead drunk.”
“That’s the Way It Was,” co-authored by Lionel Duroy, is not currently available in English.