Film actor urinates on plane, delays flights

French film actor Gerard Depardieu was caught short on a Paris to Dublin flight and chose not to bother going to the toilet before relieving himself, airline CityJet told AFP on Wednesday.

"I will only confirm that he, in effect, urinated in the plane," a spokeswoman for the Air France-KLM subsidiary said, confirming a report on Europe 1 radio, which interviewed a passenger who witnessed the incident.

According to the passenger, who was not named, the 62-year-old was visibly inebriated and tried to stand up before take-off, when passengers are asked to wear seatbelts, declaring: "I want to piss, I want to piss."

When a stewardess asked him to sit and wait 15 minutes until the jet took off and reached cruising altitude, he said he could not wait. "And there and then he stood up and did it on the floor," she told the French broadcaster.

"We could see he had been drinking. The stewardess was dumbfounded," she added. "No-one said anything. It all happened with courtesy. Mr Depardieu sat back down and the plane returned to the parking area to be cleaned."

The spokeswoman said the incident had taken place on Tuesday evening on board flight AF5010. She did not say whether the company intended to take further action against the popular French star.

According to a Paris Airports website, the Dublin route is served by an Avro RJ-85, a regional jet that can carry up to 111 passengers and is routinely equipped with onboard toilets both fore and aft.

Depardieu is perhaps the best known face in French cinema, having appeared in almost 200 films, and is known abroad as the star of the 1990 literary epic Cyrano de Bergerac and the US romantic comedy Green Card.

He is also a winemaker and in 1990 was convicted of drunk driving.

Depardieu 'was trying to pee into bottle' on delayed flight

France's best-known film star Gerard Depardieu insisted Wednesday he had been trying to urinate discreetly into a bottle when he splashed a plane's carpet and caused a flight delay, friends said.

Earlier, Air France-KLM subsidiary CityJet said the actor had been escorted off a Paris to Dublin service on Tuesday after he relieved himself on the floor of the cabin as it was taxiing towards the runway for take-off.

One fellow passenger, interviewed on French radio, alleged the 62-year-old bon vivant appeared to have been drinking and had stood to urinate openly after being told he could not use the toilet until after take-off.

But friends of the "mortified" star, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, said he had told them he was "absolutely not drunk" but had been caught short and forced to pee into an empty bottle as privately as possible.

They confirmed the witness' account that the stewardess had asked him to wait 15 minutes before the toilets would be opened, and he had agreed, but said that the flight had then been delayed a further 20 minutes.

A flying companion, fellow actor Edouard Baer, had therefore offered him an empty bottle to ease himself.

When some urine spilled on the floor, Depardieu was mortified and offered to clean it up himself, but the crew decided to turn round and taxi back to the terminal and have him escorted off the jet by ground crew, they explained.

"No charges were brought and no fine was imposed, and he had the impression that his position about the misunderstanding and the inflexible attitude of the stewardess had been understood by those he spoke to," one added.

The source added Depardieu had been able to take the next flight to Dublin, where he was to join the crew of the next movie adaptation of the Asterix comic books, in which he plays the warrior's huge sidekick Obelix.

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