French film star Gerard Depardieu said he had no choice but to relieve himself into a bottle on a plane last month after a flight attendant blocked the bathroom door, insisting “I’m not a monster.”
In a daytime talk show interview last Tuesday with Anderson Cooper — who had broken into a giggling fit over the incident on his prime-time CNN news show — France’s best-known movie star admitted the bottle was not up to the task.
He explained via satellite from Dublin that he tried to use the lavatory on board the Paris-to-Dublin flight before takeoff but that the flight attendant “blocked the door with her foot” and ordered him to return to his seat.
Photo: AFP
“I say: ‘Madam, I have a lot of pee. I have to go pee. It’s hurt me,’” a laughing Depardieu recalled. “I’m not a terrorist, I just want to pee.”
After the flight attendant again refused, he borrowed an empty bottle from a friend and relieved himself. “It was so beautiful, you know. It’s very hurt,” the French actor said in English.
“I’m not a monster. I’m just a man who wants to pee ... I don’t understand why she blocked the door.”
He said her outrage grew when the bottle overflowed.
“The bottle was too small, you know. I am an elephant ... I said: ‘Don’t worry, I will clean it up.’”
By then other passengers had gathered around with camera phones, and the plane soon taxied back to the terminal, where Depardieu was escorted off by the ground crew without incident.
When Cooper asked if “any wine was involved,” Depardieu said no.
Cooper, a CNN host who often reports from conflict zones, broke down into a fit of laughter during a light-hearted segment on his news show a few weeks ago after reciting a series of groan-worthy puns about the Depardieu incident. Cooper has since launched his own daytime talk show.
Depardieu is perhaps the best known face in French cinema, having appeared in almost 200 films, and is best known abroad as the star of the 1990 literary epic Cyrano de Bergerac and the US romantic comedy Green Card.
Amy Winehouse’s father also ran into trouble trying to convince a celebrity to follow the rules. He says the fight to get his daughter off drugs often turned physical, as he tussled with the drug dealers and gangsters who were supplying her with them.
“I spent my time fighting with drug dealers, and I mean proper fighting,” Mitch Winehouse said in an interview on Tuesday. “And I’m a middle-aged man, who is overweight, having fistfights with people.”
Winehouse said his daughter finally budged once she saw how hurt her family was: “She witnessed all this stuff going on, of how her family and her friends were fighting gangsters and she decided she didn’t want to put her family in that position anymore.”
Amy Winehouse, who had struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, was found dead at her London home on July 23. Her father is launching The Amy Winehouse Foundation on Wednesday, which would’ve been the singer’s 28th birthday.
Mitch Winehouse said there were some negative influences in the group that surrounded Amy. He said he was naive about her drug use early on.
“I didn’t know the extent of her problem until maybe four months before she decided to quit,” he said.
The father — who has been doing interviews and has appeared on TV to talk about the US launch of the foundation — said talking about his daughter is “very hard,” but it “is helping us deal with our grief.” He made various appearances with Amy’s mother, Janis; his current wife, Jane; and Amy’s last boyfriend, Reg Traviss.
“I don’t know what her ultimate plans were, but she was certainly talking to me about having children,” Mitch Winehouse said of his daughter’s last relationship. “Even when she was drinking, she was in a great place.”
He believes his daughter died of a seizure related to alcohol detoxification. She had seizures in the past, he said. A full inquest into her death begins next month.
On a much higher plane, star singer Andrea Bocelli dazzled thousands with his signature brand of pop and opera in a cold, wet night in New York City’s Central Park, which will be etched in his memory as an important career milestone.
The Italian tenor considers Thursday’s free concert, which 60,000 had been expected to attend, as one that keeps him squarely in the footsteps of other opera stars including Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo who also have performed on the stage of the famed park.
“Most of [my] important milestones happened in New York,” the 52-year-old told reporters through an interpreter.
Bocelli, who has sold 70 million records worldwide, has performed at other famous New York venues including Lincoln Center and Madison Square Garden. But a free concert in Central Park is always a special event for performers as well as New Yorkers.
Thursday’s concertgoers, including billionaire Donald Trump, were entertained for more than two hours. The music accompanied by the New York Philharmonic was a mix of well-known arias such as La donna e mobile and Italian and American pop songs.
Bocelli alternated his solos by singing duets with his “friends” who included sopranos Ana Maria Martinez and Pretty Yende, violinist Nicola Benedetti, bass baritone Bryn Terfel and flutist Andrea Griminelli.
The crowd jumped to their feet late in the show when pop star Celine Dion arrived on stage in a glittery, white gown to sing a hit duet she recorded with Bocelli, The Prayer.
That was followed by a duet of New York, New York with American crooner Tony Bennett, with whom Bocelli recently recorded for the first time. Their song, Stranger in Paradise,” will appear in Bennett’s upcoming CD, Duets II.
Finally, Grammy Award-winning rapper T.I. is once again out of federal prison and in a halfway house, his attorney said on Friday.
The Atlanta entertainer, whose real name is Clifford Harris, was released Aug. 31 from a federal prison in Arkansas where he was serving an 11-month sentence on weapons possession and drug charges.
T.I. was assigned to a halfway house in Atlanta for the last month of his sentence. But shortly after leaving Arkansas, the rapper was returned to a federal prison in Atlanta because officials had an “issue” with his ride on a luxury bus from Arkansas to Atlanta, attorney Steve Sadow said.
Prison officials believed T.I. was conducting business on the bus, Sadow told reporters on Friday.
“But we provided them with information that he wasn’t actually conducting business on the bus,” the attorney said.
On Thursday, T.I. was transferred from prison to the Atlanta halfway house, Sadow said. The entertainer is scheduled to be released on Sept. 29.
He was sentenced in October last year to 11 months in prison for violating the terms of his probation on federal gun charges after he was arrested on suspicion of possessing the drug ecstasy.
It was the rapper’s second stint behind bars in three years.
T.I.’s career began as a rapper in 2001, but he then branched out into other areas of the music and film industry, finding success both as a producer and actor.
Cable channel VH1 said last month that it had teamed up with the 30-year-old Got Your Back singer for a 10-episode series that will follow his readjustment to life outside prison and the making of a new album. The series is due to premiere on Dec. 5.
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