Brigitte Nielsen 'Arnold Schwarzenegger cheated with me too!'

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Brigitte Nielsen enjoyed a passionate affair.

The attraction had been instant ‘and since we both knew that wouldn’t last beyond  the movie, we didn’t hold back’, admits Nielsen now. ‘We wanted to try everything and so we did. There were no restrictions, no promises, nothing, and it was a great time in my life.’

Schwarzenegger may be getting it in the neck from all quarters at the moment, but Nielsen still has a few kind words to say about him. His 25-year marriage to Kennedy family member Maria Shriver has ended amid allegations he had fathered at least one love child, and he is alleged to have had as prodigious an appetite for women during that time as he did when he was single.

He and Nielsen were an item during the mid-Eighties. He wasn’t married to Shriver at the time, although they were a couple.   

‘How serious it was with her, I don’t know,’ says Nielsen. ‘He never spoke about her — and the way he was living his life with me, I felt I was the only one. Then I realised about him and Maria and, wow, I felt cheated. Maybe I wouldn’t have got into it if he said “I’m going to marry Maria and this is dead serious”, but he didn’t, and our affair carried on.’

Did he ever ask Nielsen to marry him? ‘Absolutely not’, she laughs. ‘If he had, he wouldn’t have become Governor of California.’

She may have a point. Six foot one in her stockinged feet, with peroxide blonde hair, an impressive bosom and an ex-file that includes actors Sylvester Stallone (to whom she was married) and Sean Penn (‘I haven’t had many one-night stands, but he was one and oooh . . . he was amazing!’) it is fair to say that Brigitte is not average political wife material. 

But then she is not your average anything, which no doubt attracted young Schwarzenegger to the Danish ex-model. ‘Arnold at the time was a lot of fun,’ she recalls. ‘He was very  professional and had a very sarcastic sense of humour. He told me at the beginning of shooting Red Sonja, “One day, I will become Governor of California”, and we were all laughing, but I had a feeling he would do it one day.’ 

Far from being the boorish, sexual predator he is being portrayed as, Schwarzenegger was, she insists, very romantic. ‘I was about to fly home to Copenhagen for Christmas and Arnold left me this gift. I won’t say what it was, but it was a beautiful over-the-top present.’

Was he in love with her? ‘I  think so.’ The speculation that he may have fathered further love children in addition to a 13-year-old  son Joseph, by the family housekeeper Patty Baena, shocks Nielsen.   

‘There’s more? It breaks my heart because he and Maria  have four kids and you don’t just have a baby with someone else. I’m surprised Arnold thought he could get away with it and I feel bad for Maria.’ 

Then she lapses into cryptic mode. ‘One day I will write another book about what I know. There is so much that I’m not allowed to talk about.’  She sighs. ‘It’s not fair.’ 

For now, however, we must content ourselves with Nielsen’s current autobiography, You Only Get One Life. She’s certainly lived the one she’s got to the full, with the book detailing everything from her rise from shy schoolgirl to Amazonian model, taking in five husbands and four children. 

She doesn’t gloss over unsavoury aspects of her life, including domestic abuse, alcohol addiction and a suicide attempt. It’s a surprisingly painful and sad read at times. ‘But I’ve had so many great times,’ she says. ‘You can come out the other side.’ 

A constant refrain in the book is the dichotomy between brassy, intimidating Brigitte, with whom we are most familiar, and the girl born Gitte Nielsen — the shy and vulnerable creature who comes through in her writing.