A French tourist has offered her pizza to a man rummaging through rubbish in the streets of New York, not realising it was Richard Gere making a movie.

Karine Valnais Gombeau, a 42-year-old Parisian, spotted the actor, a cap pulled down over his ears, sifting through rubbish as she came out of a pizzeria near Grand Central station in Manhattan, with her husband and 15-year-old son, the New York Post reported on Sunday.

Without blinking, Gere, 64 asked her what was in the bag she offered him.

“I tried to tell him in English but it came out half in French,” Gombeau told the Post.

“I said, ‘Je suis desolee [I am sorry] but the pizza is cold’.”

“He said, ‘Thank you so much. God bless you’,” she said.

She left without knowing it was Gere making his new movie Time Out of Mind, until the Post ran a photo of the moment two days later.

“It was magical … It’s crazy, this story. It’s unimaginable that something like this could happen,” she said, adding she thought Gere, the star of Pretty Woman and Chicago, was “very handsome, even at his age”.