To describe him as dazzling would be an understatement. Viewed soberly, René Weller was a talented boxer who helped his sport gain increasing attention in Germany in the 1980s. Even more than with his fights, however, he dominated the headlines at the time with the spectacle he created around them, but later also repeatedly with his criminal machinations. Weller passed away on Monday at the age of 69 as a result of his dementia. This was confirmed by his wife Maria Picture-Newspaper late Tuesday evening.
The disease was diagnosed in 2014, recently René Weller was getting worse and worse, he was cared for by palliative care physicians. “I let him go, it was very difficult in the last few weeks,” said Maria Weller also reported on Instagram about the last days and hours of her husband. “He was screaming, he was in pain.” A dazzling life came to a sad end.
Weller was a kind of cult figure in the 80s because he was above all a gifted entertainer. He acted like a playboy, he was “beautiful René”. The trained goldsmith and heating engineer wore a golden boxing glove on a gold chain around his neck, he posed in a royal cloak or surrounded by three beauties in a swimming pool. “I’m the only German who looks better naked than dressed,” he said.
Weller also posed alone in the swimming pool – including golden boxing gloves.
(Photo: imago/Sven Simon/imago/Sven Simon)
Weller left out almost nothing in his life. Women, parties, showbiz, prison. In the past 20 years, appearances as a C-celebrity in the Big Brother house, at the “Perfect Dinner” or at the “Celebrity Wife Swap”. The fact that the Pforzheimer was once the best German lightweight boxer and as such European champion, that he only lost one of his 55 fights as a professional, was increasingly forgotten.
“Others would have to have three lives to experience what I experienced,” Weller once told SID. He kept doing things that others thought were crazy. Before his fight against Charles LaCour in Las Vegas at the end of June 1982, he had previously staked his entire fee of $25,000 on his win, he told the Mirror.
Of course he won the fight. Part of Weller’s eventful life was that he had several run-ins with the law during and after his career. He was sentenced to imprisonment in 1999 for cocaine trafficking, incitement to forge documents and illegal possession of weapons. He spent four and a half years in prison. Weller always claimed he had been tricked: he had never had anything to do with drugs.