He’s not your “American Gigolo.”
Veteran actor Richard Gere once threatened to file a lawsuit unless a British talk show removed the words “sex symbol” from his introduction, as host Michael Aspel recalled.
Speaking to the Mail Online Saturday, Aspel, 90, revealed behind-the-scenes details about the time the “Pretty Woman” star appeared on his show in 1989.
“When Richard Gere came on the show, I introduced him and at the end I said, and ‘he’s done this, he’s done that,’ and I used the phrase ‘sex symbol,'” said Aspel. “After the interview, we had a phone call from his agent saying if I didn’t remove the sex symbol thing, they were going to take it up with their lawyer.”
According to Aspel, the “Chicago” star did not want to “be known as a sex symbol.”
“It was very odd,” continued the former TV host. ” But he took himself very seriously because he did a lot of stuff for the people of Tibet.”
Aspel’s show “Aspel and Company,” which ran from 1984 to1993 featured several other A-listers including Elizabeth Taylor, the only woman Aspel had ever written a fan letter to, and Barbra Streisand.
The Post reached out to Gere for comment.
Gere, 74, recently made headlines after his ex-wife Cindy Crawford made a rare comment about the Golden Globe winner in her brand new series “The Super Models.”
“In the beginning of a relationship, when you’re a young woman, you’re like, ‘You like baseball? I like baseball. You’re really into Tibetan Buddhism? I might be into that. I’ll try that,’” said Crawford, 57, in the series.
“You’re willing to kind of mold yourself around whoever you are in love with,” added the model.
Crawford, who was 22 at the time, and the “Runaway Bride” actor famously married in Las Vegas in 1991 before announcing their split three years later.
In 2013, the model opened up about their short-lived romance while appearing on “Oprah’s Master Class.”
“I think a lot of what happened with Richard and I was I was still 22 and at 22 as a young woman, I was kind of still figuring out who I was and what I wanted to be,” said Crawford. “He was already 37, so in some ways he knew that I was still growing and changing.”
“I didn’t want to hear it from him because at 22, you think you know everything and you think you’re already formed and then you realize 10 years later, you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, they were totally right.’”
Crawford later told Porter magazine in 2015 that the pair “didn’t spend enough time together.”
In 1998, she married Rande Gerber, with whom she shares two children while Gere shares two sons with his wife Alejandra Silva.
