The family of the French businessman, actor, singer and former politician Bernard Tapie have attacked a Netflix miniseries based on his colourful life.
The series, described as half-biopic, half-fiction, will relate the story of “an ordinary man with an extraordinary ambition”.
Tapie, one of France’s best-known personalities, died two years ago. The son of a Paris plumber, he rose to become president of Olympique de Marseille (OM) football club and hold a major stake in the sportswear brand Adidas.
The first of seven episodes inspired by the tycoon will be released by Netflix on Wednesday despite vehement opposition from Tapie’s widow, Dominique, and children.
Dominique told French journalists: “I don’t dread it, I deplore it. The producers said it was a fiction, but a fiction called Bernard Tapie? I find that incredible. I do not condone it and I remind everyone that we were not consulted in any way.”
Shortly before his death in October 2021, her husband expressed his objections to the series.
“I was against it … to do it without asking without my agreement in principle; not good. A documentary is something else, but to use my name, it’s a bit too much,” he told Var-Matin, his local newspaper.
In April this year, Tapie’s daughter Sophie railed against the series on social networks. “Knowing that he had stated before his death that he was against this series … Does disrespect have no limits?” she said.
Tapie, who led Marseille to the Champions League title in 1993, died aged 78, having been diagnosed with stomach cancer almost five years previously. He was elected as an MP in 1989, and served two stints as the urban affairs minister in the cabinet of François Mitterrand, the president, in the early 1990s.
He served a six-month jail sentence for match-fixing and his business empire began unravelling after he sold Adidas, which caused one of France’s longest legal sagas and embroiled politicians and ministers. He claimed he had been cheated on Adidas’s sale price and was eventually awarded €400m in compensation after the state-run Crédit Lyonnais bank was found to have undervalued the brand. In a reversal of fortune, however, Tapie was later ordered to pay the money back and charged – then acquitted – of embezzling public funds as a result of the payout.
He is played in the series by Laurent Lafitte, who starred opposite Isabelle Huppert in Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 psychological thriller Elle.
