A DESPERATE child wanders the streets, earning money as a rent boy, stealing from clients and even taking jewellery from graves.
It could be the plot from one of his films, but Gerard Depardieu (pictured) has revealed these are, in fact, details from his troubled past.
The award-winning actor, 65, said his struggling mother told him as a child that she had tried to abort him using knitting needles.
Writing in his autobiography, It Happened Like That, he says he started wandering the streets when he was just 10. He began charging men for sex and mugged some of his clients.
He also admits that he helped a man to dig up newly buried bodies in a cemetery to steal jewellery and shoes. At 16, he spent three weeks in prison for stealing a car. After moving from Châteauroux, where he grew up, to Paris, Depardieu says he was saved from destitution by a talent spotter who paid for him to study drama.
The controversial actor, who has admitted he drinks 14 bottles of alcohol a day, says of the habit: “I’m obsessed with the racket in my body, the beating of my heart, the gurgling of my intestines.
“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.”
He also describes his friendship with Russian president, Vladimir Putin, writing: “I think he immediately liked my hooligan side... the fact that I had occasionally been picked up off the pavement dead drunk. Like me, nobody would have bet a penny on him when he was 15.”
Depardieu moved to Russia from France last year because he felt president François Hollande had left France in a “filthy mess”. – Daily Mail