‘I survived the knitting needles’: Gerard Depardieu says he lived through his mum’s abortion attempt

FRENCH film star Gerard Depardieu has made the astonishing claim that his mother tried to abort him with knitting needles.

French actor Gerard Depardieu claims he survived his mother’s abortion attempt. Picture: AFP/Tiziana Fabi

FRENCH film star Gerard Depardieu was unwanted by his parents and survived an abortion attempt with knitting needles, he claims in his new book.

The New York Post reports Depardieu, 68 — who has acted in 170 films for such directors as Bernardo Bertolucci, François Truffaut and Ang Lee — revealed in his 2014 autobiography, It Happened Like That he was once a prostitute, a car thief and an occasional grave robber.

Gerard Depardieu has released a new book. Picture: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

In his new book Innocent, he says: “Since I wasn’t wanted by my parents, since they made sure I knew I was an accident in my mother’s womb, that I had survived the knitting needles, I was always very happy to be there, I always lived as someone who wanted to be a gift to others.”

“I’m a bit like the cat that one wants to drown but which got out of the bag and found itself alone on a bank,” he writes. “I could’ve become a wild cat, but I took advantage of that infinite freedom to open my eyes wide and observe my surroundings.”

Actor Gerard Depardieu at the 74th annual Venice International Film Festival earlier this month. Picture: Ettore Ferrari/ANSA via AP

Candice Bergen, whose first husband was director Louis Malle, will interview Depardieu on Monday at the French Institute Alliance Française in New York.

Bergen might want him to explain this sentence: “My mother’s father slept with my father’s mother.”

And remark on the actor’s friendship with Vladimir Putin, who granted him Russian citizenship in 2013.

“I think [Putin] immediately liked my hooligan side,” Depardieu has said. “The fact that I had occasionally been picked up off the pavement dead drunk ... Like with me, nobody would have bet a penny on him when he was 15.”

Gerard Depardieu (left) meets Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi, Russia in 2013. Picture: AFP/Ria-Novosti/Mikhail Klimentyev

This story originally appeared in The New York Post and has been republished here with permission.

Originally published as ‘I survived the knitting needles’: Gerard Depardieu says he lived through his mum’s abortion attempt