Hollywood star Richard Gere says he’s having a hard time fighting off an image that has dogged him since his breakthrough role in the 1980 movie American Gigolo – that of being a sex-symbol.
The 52-year old actor, who was in Madrid on Monday to promote his latest film Unfaithful, in which he plays a husband whose wife has an adulterous fling, said many people found it hard to imagine him swapping his heart-throb status for the role of a cuckold.
“Everyone keeps asking me about that,” joked the actor. “Wait a minute, you are the gigolo, how can there be another gigolo?
“But the truth is Olivier is much better than me. I guarantee all the ladies in the room, he is much better,” Richard continued, referring to his co-star in the movie, Frenchman Olivier Martinez.
On current release across the UK, Unfaithful centres on Diane Lane and Richard Gere as a couple living in the New York city suburbs whose marriage goes dangerously awry when the wife has an affair with a younger man.