FOUR years after going public with a diagnosis of prostate cancer, actor Robert De Niro is waging a legal battle against the insurance carrier for a Hollywood film that was delayed by his illness. De Niro filed a motion last Friday seeking to dismiss a US$1.8 million ($2.
8 million) lawsuit brought last year by the Fireman's Fund Insurance, which claims he misrepresented his health status to them days before shooting was scheduled to start. Fireman's Fund in turn sued the 63-year-old Oscar winner for fraud, saying he misled the insurance company by failing to disclose at the time he signed a health certificate on October 13, 2003, that he had just undergone a prostate biopsy. De Niro has acknowledged getting a biopsy on October 10, 2003.
But he says he received no diagnosis until October 15, and was therefore truthful when he indicated that he had never been diagnosed with or treated for a prostate disorder. De Niro failed to fully disclose information which was critical to our decision to offer insurance coverage, the insurance company said. As a result, the film had to be postponed for four months, at significant cost to the motion picture production company.
De Niro's lawyer, Robyn Crowther, denied that her client sought to conceal his illness or misrepresent his health status, saying the actor had assumed when he underwent the biopsy that the results would be negative. One day you don't have cancer, and the next day you get diagnosed and you do, and this happened to be in the middle of those couple of days. After the cancer treatment, De Niro returned to work on Hide and Seek, which was released in 2005.
The film went on to gross more than US$122 million at the box office worldwide.
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