Gerard Depardieu has lived quite a life. The celebrated French actor, now 65, just released his autobiography, It Happened Like That (Ca C'est Fait Comme Ca), and it appears to include some pretty stunning revelations. Among the most shocking? The claim that he worked as a "rent boy" when he was just 10 years old.
Bits and pieces of the book were published by the U.K.'s Daily Mail on Sunday, Oct. 5. According to the paper, Depardieu started performing sexual favors for cash when "he was just 10 but could easily pass for being 15."
"I've known since I was very young that I please homosexuals," he reportedly wrote, adding that he "would ask them for money" when they approached him for sex.
Later in life, he started mugging his clients. "At 20, the thug in me was alive and kicking," the Daily Mail quotes his book as saying. "I would rip some of them off. I would beat up some bloke and leave with all his money."
The Green Card star — who says he served three weeks in jail at age 16 for stealing a car — also admits in his autobiography to pick-pocketing students at anti-government protests in 1968, and to dabbling in grave-robbing, the Daily Mail reports. He and another man would dig up recently buried bodies and steal their jewelry or shoes.
Eventually, of course, Depardieu grew up and started a family of his own with actress Elisabeth Guignot, with whom he had two children, Julie and the late Guillaume, who died at age 37 of pneumonia. His relationship with his kids was strained, however, in part because of his relationship with his own parents.
According to the Daily Mail, he "could never find the words" to tell his kids he loved them because his own father, Dede, never found the words with him. His mom, meanwhile, used to say she tried to abort him with knitting needles, per the tell-all.
Other parts in the actor's book touch on his now-infamous drinking habit. Earlier this year, Depardieu claimed that he finishes up to 14 bottles of wine a day.
"I'm obsessed with the racket in my body, the beating of my heart, the gurgling of my intestines, my joints cracking," he wrote in his autobiography, per the U.K.'s Telegraph, which also published quotes from the book. "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'm dead drunk."
