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Paul Hogan says he is desperate to spend his final years in Australia after a debilitating condition ravaged his health and left him too weak to carry out basic tasks on his own.
The actor, 83 – famed for his rugged appearances in the popular Crocodile Dundee film franchise – has struggled with muscle wastage and dramatic weight loss after being diagnosed with retroperitoneal fibrosis, a disorder in which inflammation and extensive scar tissue occurs in the abdominal cavity.
Discussing the condition during an interview with A Current Affair host Tracy Grimshaw – her last before she leaves Nine’s flagship program after 17 years – Hogan revealed the benign growth has wrapped around the abdominal aorta and pressed on his kidney.
And he admits the devastating impact on his health has left him pining to leave the $3.5million Venice Beach home he shares with son Chance, 24, and return to the relative tranquility of his home country.
Opening up: Crocodile Dundee star Paul Hogan (pictured) has shared his debilitating health struggles, admitting he’s desperate to spend his last years back home in Australia
He said: ‘[I’ve] been better. I had a problem on the aorta in the kidney and the treatment fixed it, but it shrunk me.
‘I just… I’ve lost all my body fat and the muscles all shrank and the strength has come back, because it left me feeble. I get Chance to open jars for me.’
He added: ‘Quite a few of my friends on diets hate me for it because I try and eat everything fatty and lardy you can think of. Everything they’re not allowed to have. I can’t put on an ounce.’
The actor was prescribed corticosteroids to shrink the growth, but now needs to regain his strength after the health scare dramatically changed his physique.
Hogan said the steroid treatment was worse than the disease.
Old times: Hogan is best known for playing heart-throb adventurer Mick Dundee in the 1986 romantic adventure Crocodile Dundee, alongside his future wife Linda Kozlowski
‘I just… I’ve lost all my body fat and the muscles all shrank and the strength has come back, because it left me feeble. I get Chance to open jars for me,’ he said
‘They shrink your muscles and [they’re] supposed to make you fat, but I got thinner and thinner and thinner,’ Hogan revealed.
‘I’m now in the business of trying to put a bit of fat on… because you feel the cold too much when you’ve got no body fat.’
Hogan now has a pacemaker fitted and says he is ‘being held together by string’ while attempting to work his way back to full health.
The actor and comedian, 83, sat down for an interview with A Current Affair host Tracy Grimshaw (right) – her last before she leaves Nine’s flagship program after 17 years
The Golden Globe winner said he always ‘maintained’ his fitness up until he was 79, and admits he is lucky to have been healthy for so long.
‘I was still fit. I’d still take out most 40 year olds,’ he said. ‘And then I turned 80 and it’s lovely that saying that “turning 80 is not for sissies” because things start to fall apart.’
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Hogan is desperate to return home to Australia as his health declines, but says he can’t leave son Chance – his child with ex-wife and former Crocodile Dundee co-star Linda Kozlowski – alone in California.
Hogan wants to return home to Australia as his health declines, but says he can’t leave his son Chance (left) alone in California
Crocodile Dundee remains Australia’s most commercially successful film of all time
‘I’m not in the place I’m meant to be, but I’m not allowed to complain about anything,’ he said.
‘I’ve had such a gifted life. I’ve had so many wonderful things happen to me without deserving them so I shouldn’t complain but, yeah, ideally I’d rather be back in Sydney because I miss the rest of my family there.’
Hogan revealed last month he’d been ‘homesick for years’ after the Venice Beach neighbourhood surrounding his home became a magnet for vagrants.
‘I miss the people, the ambience – and there’s something you just can’t put your finger on, but there’s something about Australia that is friendlier and more laid-back,’ he told The Daily Telegraph.
‘It never takes itself seriously – there’s no arrogance like there is in other places.’
Hogan is pictured with his second wife Linda Kozlowski in Beverly Hills, California, in the year 2000. The couple divorced in 2014 after 25 years together
The increasingly reclusive Hogan was photographed in public was last May when he was thought to be pinning up an angry note to vagrants camped outside his Venice mansion.
Hogan denied writing the sign that read, ‘THIS IS MY HOUSE NOT YOURS,’ despite being pictured holding a red marker near the note. He claimed he was carrying the red marker near the sign because he was leaving instructions for an electrician.
He moved to Los Angeles in 2005 with his then-love interest and former co-star Linda Kozlowski, who he met on the set of Crocodile Dundee.
He left his first wife Noelene to pursue a love affair with much-younger Linda, now 64, and they wed in 1990.
In 2014 she filed for divorce but they are said to still be on good terms and live in the same neighborhood while co-parenting their son.
In an interview with Sunrise last year, Hogan said he was ‘desperate’ to return to Australia and leave his life in America behind.
‘I am desperately homesick,’ he said. ‘I’m living in LA County, which is 10 million people and half of them have got Covid. So am I homesick? You bet your life.’
His home is in the once-elite beachside suburb of Venice, where a vast increase in homelessness has seen hundreds of tents line the beach’s famous boardwalk and a sharp increase in crime.
When asked how he was coping with Los Angeles’ crime wave, Hogan simply said he ‘doesn’t go anywhere.’
He added: ‘[I’m] bored in lockdown, and the minute I can get on the plane without being locked in a hotel for two weeks, I’m back.’
