Gérard Depardieu, who starred alongside the beautiful Ornella Muti in the 1999 film ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’, once exposed the actress to a disturbing scene that left her traumatized.
The outrageous behavior of the French Obelix, Gérard Depardieu, no longer surprises anyone. Thanks to his tax “exile” in Belgium, his move to Russia, and his attacks on many of his colleagues, the star of Cyrano de Bergerac has become the king of provocation in his home country. One of his “antics” is still etched in the memory of the Italian star Ornella Muti.
Before becoming his co-star in The Count of Monte Cristo, Muti had already worked with Depardieu in 1976. That collaboration took place on Marco Ferreri’s film The Last Woman, and the beautiful Ornella still remembers a horrific scene she witnessed on set.
In The Last Woman, a biting reflection on dying masculinity, Muti plays Valerie, a childcare worker who becomes romantically involved with a lonely engineer portrayed by Gérard Depardieu. Their impossible relationship unfolds in a collapsing world — a theme central to director Marco Ferreri, who depicted this chronicle of despair with the same rawness he had already demonstrated three years earlier in his infamous cinematic explosion La Grande Bouffe.
The leading pair in the provocative The Last Woman appears nude on multiple occasions, and the film reaches its peak of shocking revelation in the penultimate scene. In this sequence, the male character realizes that his masculinity has been nullified in an era when women are gradually gaining power. Depardieu’s character grabs an electric knife and cuts off… his genitals. Valerie, played by Ornella Muti, stands helplessly as a witness to this symbolic act of castration, holding a child in her arms. For the actress, it was a revolting moment that she would never forget.
