Gerard’s hard life

FRENCH film star Gérard Depardieu was unwanted by his parents and survived an abortion attempt with knitting needles, he claims in his new book, “Innocent.”

Depardieu (inset), 68 — who has acted in 170 films for such directors as Bernardo

Bertolucci, François Truffaut and

Ang Lee — revealed in his 2014 autobiography, “It Happened Like That,” he was once a prostitute, a car thief and an occasional grave robber.

In “Innocent,” he says, “Since I wasn’t wanted by my parents, since they made sure I knew I was an accident in my mother’s womb, that I had survived the knitting needles, I was always very happy to be there, I always lived as someone who wanted to be a gift to others.” “I’m a bit like the cat that one wants to drown but which got out of the bag and found itself alone on a bank,” he writes. “I could’ve become a wild cat, but I took advantage of that infinite freedom to open my eyes wide and observe my surroundings.”

Candice Bergen, whose first husband was director Louis Malle, will interview Depardieu on Monday at the French Institute Alliance Française on East 59th Street.

Bergen might want him to explain this sentence: “My mother’s father slept with my father’s mother.” And remark on the actor’s friendship with

Vladimir Putin, who granted him Russian citizenship in 2013.

“I think [Putin] immediately liked my hooligan side,” Depardieu has said. “The fact that I had occasionally been picked up off the pavement dead drunk . . . Like with me, nobody would have bet a penny on him when he was 15.”