Netflix tomorrow releases a series based on the life of Bernard Tapie, the controversial and popular French business magnate who was jailed in one of football’s biggest match-fixing scandals, amid protests from his family.
Tapie, who died in 2021 at 78, was also a prolific actor and occasional politician — he even became a government minister — but made his biggest mark in French public life as owner of the Olympique de Marseille (OM) football club.
He also gained prominence in the early 1990s with the purchase of German sports apparel firm Adidas, getting it back on solid financial footing before a sale that blew up into a financial scandal that reached the upper echelons of French politics.
The self-made man’s fall was as spectacular as his life, with several criminal convictions, including for fixing a Marseille match.
The series “neither attributes nor deflects blame”, screenwriter and series co-creator Olivier Demangel told AFP, calling it “pure fiction”.
Tapie is played by French actor Laurent Lafitte, whose picture displaying a clear likeness to his subject has been plastered on French billboards ahead of the launch of the seven-episode series that retraces 30 years of Tapie’s life.
It starts in 1966 with his first successful appearance in a TV talent show, and ends with his incarceration for match-fixing in 1997.
“This is the story of a television salesman who wanted to get into television and who ended up incorporating television,” Demangel said.
Tapie himself was hostile to the Netflix project when the streaming giant first floated it three years ago, according to director Tristan Seguela, who knew Tapie personally.
“He said to me: I’ll stop you right there, the answer is no”, Seguela told AFP, saying however that he ignored Tapie’s objections.
Since then, Tapie’s daughter Sophie has come out against the show, saying “there is no limit to disrespect”.
His widow, Dominique, told the Monaco-Matin newspaper that “I don’t fear this series, I deplore it”.
Seguela said it was a deliberate choice to keep Tapie’s family at arm’s length, to preserve “our freedom” in creating the fictional profile.
Demangel said the main sources for the show were around 40 books on Tapie and masses of press reports, video archives and court documents.
“This is our take on this person and his life,” he said.
Among the liberties taken by the creators was the attribution of some scenes when Tapie was urban affairs minister to president Francois Mitterrand, when they really involved prime minister Pierre Beregovoy.
Actor Lafitte said he was not certain that the series, which he said was “very French”, would appeal to international audiences.
“Americans will say: So this is about a guy who starts with nothing and makes it. Big deal,” he laughed.
French-produced shows already on Netflix include the gentleman detective story Lupin with Omar Sy, political thriller Marseille starring Gerard Depardieu, and, most recently, Bardot which recounts the early life of superstar actor Brigitte Bardot.
tells the story of the superstar actor’s early life.
