Guenter Sachs, ex of Brigitte Bardot, suicides in Switzerland

Days after billionaire playboy Guenter Sachs, the German-born former husband of Brigitte Bardot, shot himself to death in Switzerland citing a "hopeless illness," a Swiss group that assists people to commit suicide said it wants to lower the legal hurdles for elderly clients.

Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland, but EXIT says it will lobby the Swiss government in advance of possible changes to the law next year, the Associated Press reports.

Voters, meanwhile, are expected to reject a referendum Sunday to ban assisted suicide in the canton (state) of Zurich.

EXIT spokesman, Bernhard Sutter, said Monday that presently, elderly people have to meet the same requirements as other patients, including proving that they are already close to death.

Sachs, the great-grandson of Adam Opel, the founder of the Opel car company, became a Swiss citizen in 1976. A high-profile member of the "jet set" in the 1960s and 1970s, he committed suicide at his home in the Swiss resort of Gstaad on Saturday at the age of 78, according to Reuters.

Sachs' father, Willy Sachs — a Nazi Party member and an honorary SS officer — killed himself in a hunting hut in 1958

In a suicide note distributed to Swiss and German media outlets by his family Saturday, Sachs said he had been suffering from a "hopeless illness" — which he dubbed ''A'', and so believed to be Alzheimer's — and that he felt he was losing his memory, ability to think and communicate clearly.

"That menace was for me always the lone criteria for putting an end to my life," Sachs reportedly wrote.

Sachs was romantically linked in the early 1960s with Iranian queen Soraya Esfandiary. He married Bardot in 1966, just weeks after they met. They divorced three years later, and Sachs married a former Swedish model, Mirja Larsson, in 1969.

Sachs was also a photographer, art collector and documentary film maker, and counted celebrities and artists, such as Andy Warhol, among his friends.