In fact, Andre’s tolerance was so strong; he could down several bottles of wine before heading to the squared circle.
“There are a lot of crazy stories about Andre that sound fake but most are true, especially his drinking,” said former wrestler Gerald Brisco. “Andre used to ask me to get him six bottles of Mateus wine and ice them down. He would drink those before we went to the ring and no one could tell.”
Cary Elwes, Andre’s
The Princess Bride co-star,
recounted in his book how Andre the Giant once fell on a man waiting for a cab while drunk in New York City, seriously hurting him.
After that, Elwes says, the New York Police Department would tail Andre with undercover cops while he was in the city to avoid such incidents.
The Princess Bride/StillAndre the Giant and Cary Elwes in
The Princess Bride.
While the two of them worked on the
The Princess Bride, Andre would frequently take out the rest of the cast for drinks, where they’d try to keep up, which meant massive hangovers abounded on set the following day.
According to Elwes, during a line reading for film at a hotel, Andre ducked out to drink at the bar in the lobby.
After downing an enormous number of drinks, Andre attempted to walk back to his hotel room, before face-planting into the floor of the lobby and falling fast asleep.
Rather than call police or futilely attempting to move the big man, hotel employees decided it was best to place velvet ropes around the Giant.
“They decided that there was no shifting him,” recalls Elwes. “There’s no shifting a 550-pound, 7-foot-4 giant, so they had a choice: either call the authorities, and they didn’t want that kind of publicity, or wait for him to wake up, which was the wiser decision.”
The giantism allowed him to become one of the most famous wrestlers in the world also gave him intense pain throughout his life. He died at the age of 46 from heart failure,
likely caused by the strain on his body from his condition.
But while he lived, he was the undisputed heavyweight champion of drinking.