Star-crossed 'Don Quixote' actor Jean Rochefort dies age 87

Jean Rochefort, the French actor who played a key role in one of the most cursed movie sagas in Hollywood history, has died aged 87, his daughter said on Monday.

Rochefort was a French national treasure when he was cast to play Don Quixote in 1998 by the former Monty Python member Terry Gilliam, who dreamed of bringing Cervantes’ “unfilmable” novel to the big screen.

But things soon began to go wrong with the wildly ambitious project in which Johnny Depp was to play a marketing executive sent back in time who the elderly knight mistakes for his squire, Sancho Panza.

The veteran actor was struck by a prostrate infection on the first day of shooting in Spain which left him in agony on the back of his half-starved horse.

Then on the second day a flash flood washed away the sets. Four days later the production collapsed when Rochefort had to be airlifted to hospital for surgery for a double hernia.

Over the next two decades Gilliam failed seven times to get the project off the ground again, and his doomed efforts to revive it became the subject of an acclaimed documentary, “Lost in La Mancha”.