French business magnate, actor and former politician Bernard Tapie, whose swagger and made-for-headlines career made him one of the country’s best-known celebrities, died Sunday after a four-year battle with stomach cancer. He was 78.
“Dominique Tapie and his family have the immense sadness to announce the death of her husband and their father, Bernard Tapie, this Sunday,” they said in a statement to La Provence newspaper in Marseille, in which Tapie was a majority stakeholder.
“He left peacefully, surrounded by his wife, his children and grandchildren, who were at his bedside,” the statement said, adding that he wished to be buried in Marseille, “the city of his heart.”