Cindy Crawford doesn't think she was ever "friends" with her ex-husband Richard Gere.

Cindy Crawford

Cindy Crawford

The 49-year-old model married the Hollywood actor in 1991 when she was 26 and he was 42 but they split four years later, and she thinks they were just too different to last.

She said: "I think part of the problem in our relationship was that we were a lot of other things, but I don't know if we were ever friends - like peers, because I was young, and he was Richard Gere.

"And then, as I started kind of growing up and growing into myself - it's hard to change the nature of a relationship once you're already in it."

The brunette stunner - who has been married to businessman Rande Gerber, 53, since 1998 - admitted Richard has become like a "stranger" to her because she rarely sees him nowadays.

Speaking on Marc Maron's WTF podcast, she added: "We're friendly, but I think it's almost like he's gone back to being, like, 'Richard Gere' again, like a stranger, because we don't really see each other that much.

"I think why Rande and I really work is that we were friends first. I never pretended to like baseball or meditation or whatever the version is."

While Cindy wasn't ever friends with Richard, who is now 66, during their relationship, the star recently admitted she "learned about how to be famous" from the actor, but didn't want to share such memories in her latest book 'Becoming'.

She said: "I learned a lot from Richard. I learned about how to be famous. Again, that's not a universal lesson. And a lot of the personal things, everything else I learned from that, were for me. It's not something I want to share.

"If I felt that there was a great good that could come of it, I might have shared more, but I didn't think that there was anything for other people to learn or benefit from. And I wanted to be respectful."