Igor Bogdanoff dead – French TV star twin dies ‘from Covid’ at 72 just days after brother Grichka passed away from bug
FRENCH TV star Igor Bogdanoff has died from Covid just days after his twin brother Grichka passed away from a bug.
The 72-year-old presenter reportedly succumbed to the illness on Monday in a Parisian hospital just six days after his late sibling suffered the same fate.
The cause of Igor's death has not yet confirmed, but relatives claimed the entertainer had been hospitalised since mid-December.
In a family statement released by his agent, they said: "In peace and love, surrounded by his children and his family, Igor Bogdanoff left for the light on Monday January 3, 2022".
Close pal of the pair and former French Minister of Education Luc Ferry earlier said that Igor was in intensive care after contracting the virus during December.
after he was reportedly hospitalised in Paris on December 15 due to severe illness after contracting Covid.
Igor, who was married to the French writer and historian Amélie de Bourbon Parme before their divorce, leaves behind six children.
The Bogdanoff twins are perhaps most known internationally for their eclectic personalities and style, and their signature, identical facial structures, which the pair always insisted were not the result of plastic surgery.
The duo, renowned for their eccentric personalities, featured on several television programs, most recently on the French version of The Masked Singer.
In France, the Bogdanoffs started an entertainment career in the 1980s as the presenters of sci-fi show Temps X.
They would go on to host a number of other series, mostly in the realm of science fiction, including Rayons X in 2002.
Outside of the entertainment industry, Igor was also a well-educated man and had received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Burgundy.
In the last few years, the twins became a symbol in the cryptocurrency community and part of a series of memes that claimed the two had "invented Bitcoin" after Grichka boasted about contributing to the source code.
The Bogdanoffs were the center of controversy in the early 2000s for publishing lengthy physics papers in scientific journals that their peers and figures in the media argued were not sufficiently reviewed and full of misleading claims.
The twins were embroiled in a defamation lawsuit against the magazine Marianne in 2010, and courts ultimately ruled in their favor.
Still, the scientific community decried many of the twins' claims, and the "Bogdanoff Affair" papers are considered to have very little scientific value.