Richard Gere Didn’t Like ‘Sex Symbol’; Barbra Streisand ‘Too Polite’ – Veteran Chat Show Host Remembers
deadline.comRichard Gere threatened to bring his lawyers down on a British TV chat show unless they removed the words “sex symbol” from his introduction.
Veteran British TV chat show host Michael Aspel was this weekend recalling some his encounters with Hollywood luminaries, including the An Officer and a Gentleman star who came onto his primetime show in the UK in 1989.
Aspel recalled to the Daily Mail: “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.’ “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. “He would not be known as a sex symbol.
It was very odd. But he took himself very seriously, because he did a lot of stuff for the people of Tibet.” Aspel’s other A-list guests on Aspel and Company, which ran from 1984 to 1993, included Elizabeth Taylor – the only woman Aspel had ever written a fan letter to as a young man, he admitted.
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