In 1987, Jean Claude Van Damme married Gladys Portugues, his third wife. They divorced in 1992, and he remarried in 1994, but he divorced the fourth wife in 1997 and got back with Portugues in 1999, making her both his third and fifth wife. It sounds nuts, but he’s been with her ever since, and a 13-year marriage to the mother of two of your children is remarkably stable by action-star standards. Of course, no one wants to talk about that, only about the time he banged Kylie Minogue while they were shooting Street Fighter in 1994. AW YEAH JCVD GETTIN SOME STRANGE LEMME SMELL YA FINGERS DAWG.

For 1994′s abysmal videogame adaptation Street Fighter, he was paid $7m. The film was critically pounded, but it did good business – and he got to have a fling with co-star Kylie Minogue.

Speaking of pounding! HIYO! (You can tell that’s what they meant, but The Guardian is all subtle and classy).


He bristles when I bring it up. “Oh … who said that to you?” he asks, clearly forgetting the interview a few years back in which he brought it up himself. “I tell you what, you should ask her,” he says, shirking it. “She’ll have a better memory. I’m 51 years old, do you know how much I was punched in the face on The Expendables? No, no. No. And let’s just say it happened, so what? Who wants to know?”

I tell him I just want to verify before printing. “Sometimes you let go of stuff … I don’t know, maybe.” He sighs, then becomes reflective. It’s rather touching. “Yes. OK. Yes, yes, yes. It happened. I was in Thailand, we had an affair. Sweet kiss, beautiful lovemaking. It would be abnormal not to have had an affair, she’s so beautiful and she was there in front of me every day with a beautiful smile, simpatico, so charming, she wasn’t acting like a big star. I knew Thailand very well, so I showed her my Thailand. She’s a great lady.” [TheGuardianUK]

I don’t know what’s the better thing to come out of this: that Street Fighter can finally be remembered for something other than Raul Julia’s last movie (RIP), or that we can now use “I showed her my Thailand” as a euphemism for sex. Be careful when you show someone your Thailand, by the way, you don’t want to end up like David Carradine.

Who knew that Guile banging Chun-Li Cammy (oops) would be even sexier than when I imagined it in the videogame? He’s so flexible, she’s so agile – he’d do the splits, and she’d probably do that thing where she did a backflip off the wall and impale herself on his boner. No wonder that guy in the background of Guile’s level always looked like he was jacking off.