I remember watching Andre wrestle a lot when I was a kid, but didn’t realize what a sweet gentle man he was until I watched The Princess Bride last night.When he died he was 7 foot 4 and weighed around 500 pounds. He just wanted people to stop staring at him. We watched one of the extra making-of bits on the DVD, and apparently he loved making the film because everyone treated him like one of the guys.
He spent so much of his life being touted as a monster for professional reasons, but he was just a big old sweet giant boy.
They said he was too large for a regular car as a kid and one of their French neighbors took him to school in a van or truck he had. That neighbor was Samuel Beckett.
