Famous Residents in Cannes — 14 of Our Favourites

Discover famous and infamous Cannes celebrity inhabitants

1. Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Pierre Auguste Renoir was another of the great Masters who revelled in the glorious light and rustic scenes of the Cote d’Azur.

Born in Limoges, Renoir launched his artistic career as a painter in Paris. A friend of Monet, the artists spent time painting together on the banks of the Seine, playing with the bright colours and soft edges that would launch the Impressionist movement, while breaking with tradition by painting outside, en pleine air, a shocking proposition at the time.

The paintings and the Impressionist movement were not initially well-received by critics, one of whom complained about Renoir’s A Woman’s Torso in the Sunlight that he would like to ‘try to explain to M Renoir that a woman's torso is not a mass of decomposing flesh.’

At one early stage in his career, Renoir could not afford to buy paint- which seems, in retrospect, an extraordinary thing for a man whose works now sells for more than 70 million dollars. While Renoir changed styles several times in his lifetime, his paintings remained sensual and soft, depicting open air scenes of luncheon parties and country dances, as well as the fleshy nudes he was so famous for. His thousands of works also included sculptures and portraits, such as the one he painted in all of 35 minutes for German opera composer and famous anti-Semitic, Richard Wagner.

There was no darkness or political angst to be found in his paintings, and in the 2012 film, Renoir, he is quoted as saying, ‘It is all flesh, all flesh!, as if for him the human form was the beginning, the end and the meaning of life. The film, in fact, is a wonderful depiction of an Impressionist view of the South of France- gently moving camera work, curtains billowing through open French windows, and soft scenes of sunshine in the olive groves. It is all soft light and colour, as is fitting for the Impressionist master- in fact some critics have likened the film to being inside an Impressionist painting (and those who love the quiet scenes of France will enjoy this film for that alone.)

Renoir’s Riviera experience happened quite late in life, when his rheumatoid arthritis necessitated a move to a warmer clime. He and his wife moved to Cagnes-sur-Mer, to a villa called Les Collettes which commanded an imposing view across the coast and was surrounded by centuries-old olive groves and citrus trees. He lived there for 12 years until his death at age 78, continuing to paint and sculpt as he grew ever frailer and became confined to a wheelchair, his paintbrushes now put in his hands by his assistant.

After Renoir’s beloved wife Aline died his art is said to have suffered, until a young, hot-headed and beautiful redhead by the name of Andrée Heuschling came to sit as an artist’s model for him. She brought new life and vigour to his paintings, most famously sitting for one of his most famous works, Les Baigneuses (The Bathers). As it happened, the sixteen year old model brought new life and vigour to the whole household, with Renoir’s son Jean beginning an affair and eventually marrying her just after his father’s death. Jean was at the time recovering from one of the serious injuries he sustained fighting in World War One, and would grow to become an extremely famous film-maker- one whose soft, moving camera work would be credited at least in part to his father’s artistic legacy. Creativity ran in the blood in this family: of Renoir’s other two sons one was a ceramic artist and the other a film actor.

The Renoir family villa now serves as his museum, where visitors can see his wheelchair, sat lonely in front of his easel, an empty palette and paintbrushes sitting by the side.

Renoir is today considered by many critics the least impressive of the Impressionists but is much loved by the people- French people in particular. This gap between the opinions of the critics and the masses probably stems from the same reason: with Renoir’s masterpieces, ‘what you see is what you get’ and there is no need to ponder for any greater meaning in the beauty. His works’ intellectual simplicity may offend the critics searching for something deeper, but it delights the senses of those who appreciate it for the beautiful use of colour and depictions of the scenes and people of France at the turn of the 20th century.

2. W. Somerset Maugham

The famous novelist Somerset Maugham left England to find a place in the Mediterranean sun among the colony of artists, royals and celebrities living on the glamorous Cote d’Azur.

In 1928 he bought a villa on Cap Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat which had previously housed the Belgian King’s confessor- no doubt a busy man given the nature of King Leopold’s many moral transgressions. The run-down Moorish villa was called La Mauresque, and it was soon transformed into a beautiful cool-white mansion of courtyards, galleries and vaulted ceilings, while in the gardens there were fruit trees, lush lawns and swimming pools, where the male guests could often be found swanning around naked.

An invitation to visit Somerset Maughaum’s mansion on the Cap was considered quite the coup by Riviera high society, and a steady stream of luminaries came to visit, including Picasso, Harpo Marx, Neil Coward, Ian Fleming, Rudyard Kipling, T.S Eliot, H.G Wells and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

One must wonder in part why they were so keen to visit, for the feted author was well-known for his satirical, acerbic and thinly -veiled autobiographical works, which skewered his acquaintances and the locals in the places he visited. Certainly not all his guests were impressed with their host, with Noel Coward calling him ‘The Lizard of Oz’ and Virginia Woolf likened him to ‘a dead man’. He was far from universally liked, but still they came.

Maugham very famously judged the Riviera to be ‘a sunny place for shady people’, and while most of his works were set in far-flung parts of the dying British empire, he did reserve some of his literary flair-and barbs- for those he knew and lived amongst, such as in his satirical books, Cakes and Ale, and The Razor’s Edge.

He wrote on high society and falls from grace, grasping social climbers and the temptations of the flesh. His books detailed the foolishness and corruptions of the rich and the grasping and pretentions of the aspiring classes. He had plenty of examples of debauchery and degradation on the Cote d’Azur to use as material (as no doubt he would today).

The Nazis invasion of Paris in 1940 forced his rapid and undignified departure from France with just one suitcase. At the age of 66, he took hasty passage on a coal steamer crammed with 500 other refugees, of which 7 died on the 20 day trip to England through malnourishment and thirst.

After passing the rest of the war in South Carolina, America, he returned to his beloved villa in France, which had been looted by the German and Italian troops and extensively damaged by the Royal Navy as they shelled Cap Ferrat in an attempt to destroy the lighthouse. In fact, when he moved back in, he found an unexploded bomb resting on his bedroom floor, and said the villa ‘looking like a patient who has barely survived a deadly disease.’ He restored his dear patient to grand health and spent many more years at La Mauresque, finally dying in his bed in 1965 at the age of 91, looking out across the Mediterranean Sea.

While the villa has been rebuilt several times over, you can still see the mark of this fascinating man on the iron gates, the Moorish hand of Fatima to ward off the evil eye-the symbol that also appears on many of his first edition books.

A sculpture of queen & servants in a park

3. Queen Victoria of England

It’s hard to overstate the importance of Queen Victoria of England in the transformation of the French Riviera from sleepy rural backwater into a glittering playground for royals and celebrities.

When the Queen of England first visited in 1882, the few thousand English in the area were gaunt pale things in the dying throes of tuberculosis, who had flocked here after an English doctor had written a book about the healing air of Menton. It was a place of convalescence and death among the citrus groves, promising miracles under the Mediterranean sky. Yet when the Queen set herself up in a villa in Menton on her first visit in 1882, European heads of state and celebrities were quick to follow. The number of English visitors skyrocketed, from 15000 to 100 000 in less than 20 years, and the Queen would come back 8 times, spending more than a year of her life in what she called ‘the sunny, flowery south’.

The English Queen had given the Cote d’Azur the royal seal of approval as it were, and sheepfolds and lonely cliffs were soon replaced by ornate carriages, railways and vast villas. High English society had found its place in the sun. The widow queen so famous for strict moral values and dressing in mourning black apparently reacted with such childish delight to the beauty and people of the French Riviera that one of her maidservants commented: ‘she enjoys everything as if she were 17 instead of 72".

She threw flowers at the Battle of the Flowers on the Promenade des Anglais, rode on donkey carts up medieval tracks and was once told off for trampling the flower beds at the villa of Alice de Rothschild in Grasse- after which lecture the Queen referred to her friend Miss Rothschild as ‘The All-Powerful One.’

She even fancied a shepherd or two, writing in a letter that they were "very picturesque looking, wearing knee breeches, sort of white stockings and leggings, and a large black felt hat…Some are very handsome boys". She’d been widowed for a while by then.

Queen Victoria was much loved by the locals- for she not only entertained royals and the wealthy, but also received locals at the hotel she stayed at in Cimiez, Nice- including a troupe of fishwives who tried to kiss her on both cheeks! She offered her hand, of course, to put an end to such nonsense, but declared them ‘most friendly.’ She also gave money to local beggars, deciding that ‘I know I am sometimes exploited, but I prefer to make a mistake in giving than making a mistake in not giving.’ She was also very active in local charities, including the Society for the Protection of Animals, and you can still find a humble water trough she had built for thirsty horses on the high trail between Nice and Villefranche.

She was predictably not amused by Monaco, seeing it as a den of iniquity- and in fact it was on the Riviera, at Hyeres, that she famously uttered the phrase: ‘We are not amused’ after being told an off-colour joke.

One of her children died along this stretch of coast. Her youngest, Prince Leopold died in Cannes after slipping over at the yacht club. He had haemophilia and bled to death from his injuries, and St George Church was built in his honour.

What is so strange about the whole affair is how few people know how much time one of England’s most important monarchs spent here on the Cote d’Azur, or how much she loved it. Some historians even credit her love affair with the Riviera for the improvement of relations between England and France after so many centuries of war and hatred.

For more about the fascinating royal history of the Riviera, read Queen Victoria and the Discovery of the Riviera, by Michael Nelson.

black & white image of that author Aldous Huxley

4. Aldous Huxley

Location: Saint Tropez

Aldous Huxley lived on the French Riviera for seven years, during which time he wrote the dystopian novel Brave New World that would entrench him as one of the greatest 20th century writers and intellectuals. He would also be part of an alleged plot to steal DH Lawrence’s ashes and scatter them to the desert winds, a story so wonderful that it should have really appeared in a novel.

Huxley was born into a famous family. His grandfather was ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, a controversial biologist who assisted Darwin in coming up with the theory of evolution, while his mother was from a family of writers and educators well known in the latter years of the 19th century.

A young man of obvious academic potential, the young Huxley was studying at prestigious boys’ school Eton when he contracted an eye disease which rendered him largely blind in one eye. This ailment would dash his later attempts to join the military to fight in the Great War, an intervention for which the world of literature must be profoundly grateful.

After graduating with a first class BA degree from Oxford, Huxley went on to work for a short time as a French teacher at Eton, although by all reports he was terrible at it and struggled with maintaining discipline. During the war he worked for some time as a farm labourer to assist the war effort, where he met his first wife, Maria, a Belgian refugee, whom he would move to the south of France with several years later.

Upon arriving on the Cote d’Azur they stayed at the fashionable Hotel Beau Rivage in Bandol, soon moving to the Villa Huley in the small village Sanary-sur-Mer near Toulon. They spent the next seven years in ‘Villa Huxley’ as it came to be known, living a life of contentment. Huxley wrote of this place, ‘Here, all is exquisitely lovely. Sun, roses, fruit, warmth. We bathe and bask’.

He wrote Brave New World in a short 4 months, and this creative time in the Mediterranean sun would also see the publication of Eyeless in Gaza and many other works which consolidated his reputation as a formidable essayist and a novelist of dazzling intellect.

The couple drove along the Cote d’Azur in a red Bugatti, socialising with their writer friends who also flocked to the Riviera during the 1930’s, including Virginia Woolf, Cyril Connelly, and poor doomed Katherine Mansfield. No less doomed, of course, was Huxley’s great friend and literary giant, DH Lawrence, who would fall victim to consumption and die in a house near Grasse.

And this is where it gets interesting.

The Huxleys were at Lawrence’s bedside when he died, and by his graveside when he was buried. Upon hearing 5 years later that Lawrence’s adulterous wife Freida had exhumed and cremated the remains and was intending to charge tourists money to visit his shrine, the Huxleys vowed to steal Lawrence’s ashes and scatter them to the desert winds. To which Freida threatened that she would put her late husband’s ashes in a cement mixer if they tried. And they say romance is dead.

Remarkably, nobody knows what happened to the ashes, although it seems they were either left in a train station, put in the cement mixer or poured over the side of an ocean liner by Freida’s Italian lover.

Regardless, it seems fitting that two men so famous for their imaginations were involved in such a dramatic plot.

The couple then moved to America, which he reportedly loved for its vitality and extravagant generosity, but deplored for its lack of conversation. While he was working as a scriptwriter in California, he used his generous salary to get refugees away from Hitler’s Germany. His wife Maria died in 1955; Huxley married again a year later to the writer Laura Archera.

Huxley became a strong proponent for the use of LSD, claiming that it allowed an escape from the body. When he was dying of laryngeal cancer, he asked his wife to administer a fatal dose, which she did on November 22, 1963, the same day that JFK was assassinated.

Just as JFK has left a lasting legacy, so too has Huxley, whose warnings of the risk to human freedom posed by technology and government seems more prescient by the day.

Brave New World seems increasingly quoted as the years go by and the modern world grapples with the very challenges to liberty and social order that technology and government pose in our brave new world.

5. F. Scott Fitzgerald

Location: Saint Tropez

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the famous novel The Great Gatsby while living on the French Riviera, and when the film version premiered to a red carpet audience at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013, the story had in some ways come back to its spiritual home.

The novel itself may have been set in America, but the post-war themes of immense wealth and corrupted glamour- of tragedy and beauty, boredom and thwarted love- were common to the social scene of the Cote d’Azur of the time, and no doubt Fitzgerald drew some inspiration for his masterpiece from the high society he mingled with on the Riviera.

Fitzgerald arrived on the Cote d’Azur with his mentally troubled wife Zelda in 1925, at the time when the South of France was just beginning to draw a well-heeled summer crowd. In fact, the Hotel du Cap Eden Roc on Cap d’Antibes, now one of the world’s great celebrity hotels, kept a wing of the hotel open for the Fitzgeralds past April when the rest of the hotel was shuttered up, with the more traditional guests departing for the cooler climes before the hot days of summer arrived. The Murphys, friends of the Fitzgeralds, are in fact credited with the birth of the Cap d’Antibes as a summer social destination, and cleared the beach at La Garoupe of seaweed and rocks in order to make it a little playground for the wealthy. It worked; artists and the well heeled flocked to the South of France to summer on Cap d’Antibes, including Picasso, Hemingway, Rudolph Valentino and Harpo Marx.

It was a time of wild parties and hedonism, the grim memories of the war years buried in fountains of champagne and hot sleepless nights of dancing and sex and intrigues under the pines. Fitzgerald’s writing perfectly captures the dark seductions and temptations of the flesh that so characterise the French Riviera, as well as the almost mystic light and beauty of the region.

“In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of early fortifications, and the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows.”

F.Scott Fitzgerald and his wife returned to the Riviera for two seasons, living in Valescure, before his discovery of his wife’s affair led them to move away to Rome and finally back to America. Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the Night was set in the 1920’s on the Riviera- the Jazz Age- and has many overwhelming parallels with the world the Fitzgeralds lived amongst. The novel charts the disintegrating relationship between a husband and wife that most commentators take to be a thinly veiled account of Fitzgerald’s own problems with his schizophrenic wife. In another telling similarity, the fictional couple he creates in the novel also convince a hotel on Cap d’Antibes to stay open past April for a summer of glittering parties and wild abandon. Authors are always told to ‘write what you know’, and in conjuring up the darkness and light of the Riviera F.Scott Fitzgerald certainly did that- and in a way that still rings true today.

6. Henri Matisse

As is the case with many of the great artists and writers who found their way to the French Riviera, Henri Matisse’s life was shaped by three things: sickness, light, and a willingness to disappoint his father.

The story goes that Matisse was on track to be a lawyer when his mother gave him a set of paints to pass the time as he recovered from a bout of appendicitis in 1889. The rest, as they say, is history. His father was bitterly disappointed at the change of career, although no doubt somewhat consoled when his son rose to be considered one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.

Sickness would again play a defining role in Matisse’s life in 1917 when an attack of pneumonia sent him from cold Paris down to the warm sunny climes of the French Riviera to recuperate. Matisse would fall in love with the area and spend most of his life there, initially in old town Nice and the then the suburb of Cimiez, where he died in 1954. He was said to cut a strange figure indeed, a man in his fifties dressed in formal clothing canoeing endlessly around Nice port, although as he aged and cancer took its toll he took instead to walking around the Roman ruins and olive groves in Cimiez.

Like the other artists, the light of the Riviera- that mythical, ethereal light-would enchant him.

“When I realised that I would see this light again every morning,” he wrote, “I couldn’t believe how lucky I was.” When he wrote of the sea, “It is the blue of sapphires, of the peacock’s wing, of an Alpine glacier, and the kingfisher melted together. And yet, it is none of these, for it shines with the unearthly radiance of Neptune’s kingdom … it gleams, it is translucent, it shines as if it were lit up from below.”

The Cote d’Azur was his muse, in that she inspired him to paint in new ways, but she was not his subject, or at least not her physical geography, her towns and rocky headlands. Matisse tended towards still lifes and interior scenes, perhaps with a odalisque- a Turkish concubine- sitting on a bed or leaning indolently by a window.

When one looks at Paul Signac’s works, for instance, one can see the Riviera everywhere, yet Matisse, for all his love of the coastline, rarely painted it- the city of Nice sneaks into view at times in the edge of a painting, through an open window- or even once in a streetscape of the Battle of the Flowers parade that Queen Victoria had so loved on her visits here.

The light of the Riviera is credited with bringing a new colour and vibrancy to his work-as it is credited as doing the same for the work of his friend Picasso, also resident on the Riviera and one of Matisse’s friendly rivals. There was a strong artist’s community in the South at this stage- Matisse also spent time with George Seurat, Paul Signac and Pierre-August Renoir, who lived in nearby Cagnes sur Mer.

Matisse’s path to greatness was not smooth, for it rarely is. To be a genius one must innovate, and it seems that innovation in art often really pisses people off. Matisse was considered one of Les Fauves- ‘the wild beasts’ for his use of colour and bold moves away from the style of Impressionism which held sway in those days. One critic of his exhibition, which included Matisse’s wonderful ‘A Woman with the Hat’ angrily put it that ‘a pot of paint has been thrown in our faces’. However, Gertrude, Leo, and Sarah Stein-that great family of art patrons- bought and exhibited his work, and increasingly his work was respected as one of the great examples of Fauvism, Modernism and Neo-Impressionism.

As his abdominal cancer progressed and he became too weak to walk and paint, Matisse took to creating colourful decoupage (collages) while bedridden. They began small, which can be seen in a book called ‘Jazz’, but grew in size until huge colourful designs of birds and sea creatures were pinned all over the walls of his room.

During this time of illness he also designed the stained glass windows and other features of the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, despite being an atheist. He did this as a thankyou to his great friend, muse and nurse, Monique Bourgeois- who had joined the nunnery and had by that stage become Sister Jacques-Marie. Matisse said about the work, “Despite its imperfections, I consider it my masterpiece”, and it is indeed a wonderful thing to behold.

There are several tours of Nice and regular exhibitions focussed on Matisse’s life and work, and anyone with even a glimmer of interest in the master must visit the Musée Matisse Nice in Cimiez, just opposite the cemetery of the Monastère Notre Dame de Cimiez where he walked each day, and was finally buried in when he died of a heart attack at the age of 84.

7. Pablo Picasso

Although not born here, Pablo Picasso spent a lot of his life in Antibes. He felt particularly inspired whilst he was visiting the town and eventually bought a large house in Antibes and several others along the Cote d'Azur. As a result, there is a museum dedicated to him and his work in a chatueaux where he used to rent a room as a young and aspiring artist.

Over 40 years since his death during a dinner party, Picasso’s presence is still felt everywhere on the French Riviera. The menu at the beach club Paloma proudly tells you that Pablo Picasso was a loyal patron; local clothes labels announce that the great Picasso chose to wear their clothes. The Picasso museum stands tall in its tower upon the ramparts of Antibes and art lovers queue to see his famous ‘War and Peace’ fresco at the church in Vallauris.

The Spaniard was born in Malaga in 1881, but moved to Paris to further his work. Things were not easy at the beginning, as he fought hunger and cold in a grim shared flat, even burning his work on the fire to keep warm. War arrived and darkened the world, and at its end he would move down to the South, to the light and the colour and the women that would transform his work, bringing playfulness and vibrancy after his sombre Blue and Rose periods. He would live on the Riviera from 1946 to his death in 1973, creating not only the Cubist paintings that he is so famous for, but also thousands of ceramics, sketches, filings, castings, sculpture and collage.

The Spaniard was an immensely prolific artist, creating more than 50,000 works in his lifetime. His colossal contributions have made him one of the most owned and most sought after artists of history, with his painting Women in Algiers recently selling at a Christie’s auction for $179.3 million - making it the most expensive painting art sale of all time.

And of course, what people can’t own, they can always be tempted to steal. In 2016, an elderly couple living in Mouans-Sartoux were convicted of ‘concealing stolen property’- a whopping 271 pieces of Picasso’s unsigned work, which they’d been hiding in a cupboard for 40 years. They protest their innocence, saying they were given as a gift by Picasso’s last wife Jacqueline - which of course still fails to explain why they hid it in a cupboard for four decades.

Other Picasso works have gone missing on the Riviera, most famously the art theft of Dora Maar from a Saudi Arabian-owned yacht called Coral Island, that was docked on ‘Millionaire’s Quay’ in Antibes in 1999. (You can often still see the yacht sitting on the dock there, as the owner has bought the lease for the berth for 20 million euros.) Interpol suspected the yacht’s crew of an inside job on behalf of a rich patron, but the painting was never found and is no doubt sitting on a wall in a secret room somewhere, part of one deeply self-satisfied person’s private collection.

Bizarrely, Picasso was once a suspect in an art theft himself. The painting in question? None other than the Mona Lisa herself, when Da Vinci’s masterpiece was stolen from the Louvre in 1911. Picasso was brought in for questioning as his passion for the painting was well-known, but he was eventually exonerated.

Because Picasso created so very much and lived so flamboyantly, he has left traces of his life and work behind everywhere along the Riviera. When he arrived in the south in 1946, he initially lived and worked in the Chateau Grimaldi – that tremendous building on the ramparts of Antibes where the Picasso museum is now housed. He is said to have been deeply happy in this time, looking out to sea and creating works full of exuberance and playfulness. On his departure, he donated 23 paintings and 44 drawings, including his well- known work, La Joie de Vivre, which can still be seen there today.

In 1948, he moved to Vallauris, where he began a phase of ceramics, creating more than 4000 in the Fournas workshop. Interestingly, the owner of the workshop bemoaned that ‘someone who works like Picasso would never get a job.’ His most famous legacy of his time in Vallauris is the extraordinary fresco he painted for the ancient chapel, called ‘La Guerre et la Paix’- War and Peace. The church is now a museum and the wonderful piece is easily accessible for all, and you can also see his sculpture L’homme au Mouton in the village square.

Picasso was by then a very wealthy man, with exhibitions in New York and Gertrude Stein as his patron. He soon purchased a grand villa in Cannes called La Villa Californie, and the villa’s tremendous sea views are credited with bringing a revived buoyancy to his work. The villa, now called Pavillon de Flore, is currently owned by Picasso’s granddaughter, Marina Picasso, who held an exhibition of his work there in 2013 to mark the 40 year anniversary of his passing.

After a time in Château de Vauvenargues near Aix en Provence, Picasso moved to his final home in the medieval village of Mougins. He lived there with his final wife, Jacqueline Roque, working on pieces that were initially dismissed as being works of an artist past his prime but were later identified as the front runnings of Neo-Expressionism. You can see some of Picasso’s work at the Mougins Classical Art Museum, as well as photographic portraits of the artist and his working life at the Photography Museum.

Picasso’s personal life has always been almost of as much interest as his paintings. A notorious philanderer and enjoyer of young women, Picasso had several wives and many more mistresses and muses. His final wife, Jacqueline, refused to let his children from other marriages attend his funeral, and much resentment still publicly seethes within the family, particularly in regards to the vast inheritance. Jacqueline, lonely and grief stricken after Picasso’s death, killed herself with a shotgun 13 years later. Picasso was also a communist, although he reportedly said of it to his friend Jean Cocteau "I have joined a family, and like all families, it's full of shit".

For those who love art, and for those who love Picasso in particular, there could be no better place than the French Riviera to trace the master’s footsteps, and find the masterpieces and scandals he left in his wake.

8. Grace Kelly

Location: Monaco

When Grace Kelly, silver screen goddess, married Prince Rainier III, ruler of Monaco, it was thought to be the perfect Hollywood film plot with the perfect fairytale ending: Commoner meets prince, commoner falls in love with prince, commoner marries prince in glittering cathedral ceremony and goes to live out her days in a Renaissance palace built high on the cliffs over the Mediterranean Sea.

Yet the ‘happy ever after’ version of this story may be a bit of a stretch. With rumours of adultery on both sides, heavy drinking, and ultimately her early death in a car accident and her children’s seemingly endless romantic scandals- did the fairytale marriage fall victim to the ‘curse of the rock’ apparently placed on the Grimaldi family in the 13th century- that famous curse condemning all future Grimaldis to terrible marriages and difficulty in producing heirs? And was the marriage perhaps just an advantageous match designed to raise Monaco’s international image in a time of financial crisis?

While the curse is clearly not true (among other logical reasons the Grimaldi family are one of the oldest royal families in Europe), the argument about suitable marriages for economic reasons holds some water. Monaco in the 1950’s was in financial ruin, and the financing of wealthy shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis was almost all that was keeping the tiny Mediterranean country from bankruptcy. Onassis wanted to ‘rebrand’ the image of Monaco, and decided that in order to do that, Prince Rainier must marry a movie star. The bigger the better. Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor were both considered but the arrangements quickly fell through (although it’s alleged that the Prince carried on an affair with Taylor for the next 18 years.)

Prince Rainier III first met Grace Kelly during the Cannes Film Festival in 1954 when he invited her to meet him at his palace in Monaco. The event was covered by press photographers as the two walked around the castle, including a ‘meet-cute’ (as they say in the movies) staged by a lion enclosure in the palace gardens. Apparently the Prince was most taken with the elegant movie star and they kept up correspondence, announcing their engagement in January of 1956. And so it was that on April 19, 1956, the exceedingly graceful Grace Kelly would finally ascend the throne to become ‘Her Serene Highness, Princess Grace of Monaco.’ The marriage caught the world by storm, and Monaco’s star rose rapidly as Monte Carlo and its Prince bathed in the reflected glamour and star power that Grace Kelly brought to the ailing nation.

For while she may have been technically a commoner, Grace Kelly was anything but common.

Growing up in Philadelphia, Grace Kelly was a quiet child, known for playing with her dolls for hours and giving each one a different voice as she created elaborate scenes for them. As she got older, she trained her natural ‘nasal whine’ into a deeper, gentler speaking voice in order to get stage roles. It worked, and she rose to international stardom in such films as The Country Girl, for which she would win an Oscar, High Noon, Dial M for Murder and Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, which brought Grace to the Riviera for filming with Carey Grant and thus brought her into the orbit of the prince and a scheming Onassis.

Grace was known, above all, for her naming characteristic, that very grace that would let her linger as the symbol of all that was elegant, glamorous and mysterious about America’s female movie stars in the post war era. At one point, she was the most bankable actress in Hollywood. Once married though, Grace Kelly’s film career was over. The rumours have it that Prince Rainier prevented Grace from returning to the movies, and that he would not allow Grace’s movies to be shown in Monaco. When he finally relented and she accepted a role in the Hitchcock film Marnie, she had to turn it down again after the Monegasque people objected to their Princess returning to the stage. This seemed to be, at least on the surface, a trade she was willing to make.

She threw herself into her royal duties without complaint, aiding with charity events and openings and artistic ventures such as the Monaco Spring Arts Festival- perhaps because she missed the stage herself. There have been stories of adultery on both sides and bouts of her heavy drinking, but the marriage stayed a solid public partnership, even as they spent increasing amounts of time apart.
Grace Kelly, movie star princess, lost control of her vehicle on the same winding roads of the Riviera that she had driven along in scenes of To Catch a Thief, and died in hospital of a brain haemorrhage. She was only 52, and it’s thought that the car accident had been the result of a stroke.

Kelly and Rainier left behind three children- the now reigning Prince Albert II of Monaco, Princess Stephanie, and Princess Caroline- all of whom have had more than their share of scandal and marriage grief.

In 2011, Grace’s son Prince Albert married a woman who looks startlingly like his dead mother, when he wed South African Olympic Swimmer Charlene Wittstock. After years of rumours of illegitimate children, eternal bachelorhood and even homosexuality, it was hoped that Charlene would bring some of the stability and beauty that Grace had conferred on the Principality, as well as produce a male heir.

That succeeded at least on one front: while Charlene apparently tried to flee no less than three times before the marriage ceremony and had to be coaxed back to the palace, the wedding went ahead and the Princess recently gave birth to twins.

The gossip columns say that this new marriage may have fallen to the Grimaldi curse of sadness and despair, but in these new heirs, Grace Kelly’s blood- now forever entwined with the Grimaldi bloodline -lives on. Time shall tell whether they have that extraordinary grace of their grandmother, the movie star princess, who once said herself, ‘The idea of my life as a fairytale is itself a fairytale.”

a pop star with black leather jacket and sunglasses

9. Bono - U2 Frontman

Location: Saint Tropez

Bono, front man of U2 is a common sight on the French Riviera. Everyone who lives here seems to have seen him at some point- whether partying in a fashionable beach clubs in Saint Tropez, having a quiet drink in a bar in a bar in Antibes, or strolling along the beach of Eze-sur-Mer, the village where he has his mansion. He’s certainly not hard to spot, with those trademark clear glasses.

He is one of the Riviera’s most famous resident musicians- and wildly successful, with a personal fortune of around 700 million. Born Paul David Hewson in Dublin on 10 May 1960, he met the members of U2 and his wife at school- and both have stood the test of time. The band was formed in 1976 and has not looked back, while his wife Alison Hewson reportedly still considers herself very lucky indeed to be ‘Mrs Bono’.

In Eze-sur-Mer, he and his U2 bandmate The Edge bought a distinctive sea-front coral mansion at the reported price of 3.3 million euro. The four storey villa has a private beach (bien sur!) and was also the scene for the Electrical Storm video.

If you catch the train line from Nice, you will pass the back of the mansion on your way to Monaco- the train line passes right behind the villa as the train rattles along beside the glittering sea. Eze is a popular spot for the famous; Julian Lennon has a villa there, while Walt Disney and Fredrich Nietzsche have also walked the cobbled streets- in fact the steep climb from the beach up to Eze village proper is named Chemin de Nietzsche.

There is often a cluster of paparazzi hanging around the gates to the U2 mansion in summertime, and no wonder, for Brad and Angelina stayed here during her pregnancy in 2008, and other famous visitors include Robert de Niro, George Clooney, Cindy Crawford, Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Queen Rania of Jordan.

While well-known for his charity work, Bono is not averse to spending his money- his 140ft superyacht Cyan is rumoured to have cost around 15 million euro- and you can charter this rock star yacht too, if you have a spare 200 0000 per week (and no, that doesn’t cover food. Or fuel. Or tips.)

So when the press attention gets too much, he can just hop on his yacht and head out to the glittering sea- of course there’s a grand piano on board if he gets the urge to play a tune.

10. Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekylland Hyde, wrote of his time on the French Riviera with nostalgia.

‘I was only happy once, and that was at Hyeres’.

Robert was an ill child, thought to have tuberculosis. He first visited Nice and Menton when he was 12 years old, where the climate was thought to aid his chest condition. As an adult, his health started to fail again, so he returned to the Riviera. He spent a brief and terrible time in Marseilles in a damp house which wreaked havoc on his health, and where his beloved wife Fanny once once found a dead body dumped on the doorstep.

Unsurprisingly, they moved along the coast to Hyeres soon after. In this pretty coastal resort long frequented by the French elite, they lived in a tiny pseudo-Swiss folly perched on a cliff. The house itself had a bizarre story: it had been a show home on display at the 1878 Parisian exhibition, where a man had seen it, loved it and had it shipped to the South of France. Robert and Fanny loved it too: It was miniscule- never meant for living in at all- but in Chalet de la Solitude, Robert Louis Stevenson found happiness.

‘It was the loveliest house you ever saw, with a garden like a fairy story and a view like a classical landscape.’

He also wrote that ‘This spot, our garden and our view, are sub-celestial. I sing daily with my Bunyan, that great bard, ‘I dwell already the next door to heaven!’ If you could see my roses, and my aloes, and my olives, and my view over a plain, and my view of certain mountains…you would not think this phrase exaggerated.’

In this location, looking out across the Mediterranean Sea, he worked on The Silverado Squatters, A Child’s Garden of Verses, The Black Arrow and Kidnapped. They spent 16 months in this magical place, until Fanny spied an article talking of a cholera outbreak in Hyeres. Fearing for her husband’s health, she pulled a reluctant Robert away from the folly and their ‘sub-celestial view’, not realising that cholera was pretty much a permanent summertime fixture in Hyeres. Robert Louis Stevenson would not return to France, moving on to adventures in the South Pacific, eventually settling in Samoa.

While he would always miss Hyeres, he loved the Samoans and they loved him. When he was on a high, working on the last book he would ever write, he wrote that:"sick and well, I have had splendid life of it, grudge nothing, regret very little ... take it all over, damnation and all, would hardly change with any man of my time.”

The Chalet de la Solitude stands still, hanging onto the edge of the cliff with its view of mountains and sea. the favourite view on earth of a man who travelled the South Seas and the Americas, but still just wanted to come home to Hyeres, and make the mock epitaph he had written for himself could become true.

Here lies
The Carcas
Of
Robert Louis Stevenson
An active, asture and not inelegant
writer,
who
owned it to be his crowning favour
TO INHABIT
LA SOLITUDE

11. Jules Verne

Jules Verne, adventure novelist and the ‘father of science fiction’, found writing inspiration surrounded by the pine trees and villas of Cap d’Antibes, that splendid headland with its crystal clear coves, pine trees and sweeping view of the Bay of the Angels across to the snow-capped Alps.

Verne anchored his yacht Le Saint Michel II off the Cap, where more than 150 years later the superyachts now gather in great force in the months of July and August, their tenders buzzing back and forth between the exceedingly glamorous Hotel Eden Roc. He rented the Villa Les Chenes Vertes, where he worked on the stage adaption of one of his most famous works, Around the World in 80 days, and would on later visits work on 20 000 Leagues Under the Sea and A Voyage to the Moon. One must wonder what images of spaceships and aliens his mind conjured up as he looked across the sparkling sea and ancient ramparts of Antibes. I hope a UFO landed on the castle tower - now the Picasso Museum - at least once in his daydreams.

Pleasingly, while Verne wrote of fantastical moon landings completely out of the reach of mankind at the time of writing, his villa on the Cap would later be briefly occupied by the man who made the spacesuits of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins. Here, fiction and future reality collided- as was the mission of Verne’s writing. He aimed to use the breadth of scientific knowledge and potential in his fiction, researching heavily and hypothesising to the limits of imagination. For this reason- this tremendous gift of taking new scientific discovery and pushing it beyond its known limits into adventure fiction- he is known as one of the fathers of the sci-fi genre.

No doubt the man would be endlessly pleased if he knew that a spacecraft would one day be named after him, and would in 2008 carry some of his notes and copies of From the Earth to the Moon and Journey to the Centre of the Earth into orbit. His writing showed the 19th century world the dream of space travel, and in the end his very words, written in his hand, would travel to space. There’s something just lovely about that.

He also found inspiration in tales of shipwrecks and derring-do upon the oceans, and the story goes that he tried to stow away on a ship to the West Indies when he was only 11 years old. According to the tale, his father caught him just before the ship set sail and he was made to promise that he would limit his future travels ‘to his imagination.’ The story is almost certainly false, but imagine the literary loss the world would have suffered had this young boy not delved into the travels of his imagination, and grown up to be one of the most translated authors on earth.

His fascination with adventure at sea stemmed from a young age. When he was at school, one of his teachers was a widow to a ship captain who had disappeared on a journey 30 years before. The teacher reportedly liked to tell Verne and the other pupils that her captain husband had been shipwrecked on a desert island like Robinson Crusoe, and would one day find his way back to her. This theme of separated love would return many times in his books- as would that of thwarted love, drawn from Verne’s own experiences of not being permitted to marry his first two great loves. He was not yet considered a suitable marriage prospect due to his aspirations as a novelist, but things would soon change as his literary star rose with the years, and he would eventually fall in love with and marry the young widow Honorine de Viane Morel.

He would spend years on Cap d’Antibes, yet he wasn’t the most voluble fan of the Riviera. ‘I have paid for this climate’, he wrote to his publisher after several visits. ‘I’ve been here three times and each time I’ve had neuralgia, sore throats and ear abscesses.’ Certainly the Mediterranean’s reputation as a place to cure illnesses was not working terribly well on Monsieur Verne.

Les Chenes Vertes is now 152 Boulevard President Kennedy, but you can still find his name engraved on the gate post of this magnificent white villa on the sea, where he wrote of ‘impossible’ things, many of which would, and still could, become possible.

A museum dedicated to Jules Verne can be found in Nantes.

an old photo reproduction of a man with a beard

12. King Leopold II of Belgium

Location: Saint Tropez

King Leopold II of Belgium is another person who was quick to see the astonishing virtues of the Coted’Azur- much like his English cousin Queen Victoria.

But that is probably where the two royals parted company, for King Leopold is considered by history as a cruel and repulsive man with a penchant for young girls, and fingernails so long that he refused to even shake hands. His prudish English cousin would not have been amused, although she did meet with him on occasion during her sojourns in the South.

For many people, the glittering darkness behind the glamour is one of the most intriguing things about the French Riviera- a history of hedonism and ill-gotten gains in grand villas under the Mediterranean sun. If you like your Riviera celebrity history dark and brutal, then King Leopold of Belgium is a splendid place to start.

King Leopold is most famous for his reign of terror in the Free State of Congo, which he started as a private venture under the pretext of improving the lives of the native people. In reality he exploited the country for vast fortunes of ivory and rubber, using local slave labour. Murderous patrols of the mercenary Force Publique were sent to cut the hands and genitals off villagers when they failed to meet their crop targets. Estimates of those Congolese that died under his ‘reign’ number between 3 and 15 million, through torture, overwork, starvation and disease.

Like so many since, Leopold took the spoils and invested in property on the French Riviera. Over several years from 1899, he bought up much of the stunning Cap Ferrat, constructing and redesigning immense villas and palaces. He moored his yacht Clementine off the shores, where oligarch and tycoons now anchor their vast superyachts in the summertime. Initially the local farmers who owned the land were astonished that anyone would pay for this rocky land along the cliffs- useless for crops and mainly left to the roaming shepherds and their flocks. No doubt they felt pleased at the windfall, but the locals were not happy for long- a journalist soon wrote in the Nice paper that ‘at this rate the whole of Cap Ferrat will soon belong to King Leopold and there will be nothing more to do except put up a sign at the entrance saying “Belgian colony – Keep Out”’.

Leopold was married to Queen Marie-Henriette in a reportedly loveless marriage. After fathering four children they lived very separate lives and he entertained himself with many other females. It is alleged that English virgins as young as 10 were his flavour at the time, although at 65 years old he swapped them for a 16 year old prostitute by the name of Blanche Delacroix. Because he was still married, he secreted her away in one of his villas on the Cap Ferrat, safe from prying eyes. It is said that he would walk each night with a lantern from his palace along the path to her villa, his long beard wrapped up in a rubber envelope to stop the night-time dew sinking in and making his young lover’s skin uncomfortable when they embraced.

Much to the consternation of the Belgian people, he gave Blanche Delacroix, a commoner of ill-repute, the title of Baroness de Vaughan. Despite her new royalty, she was not allowed to leave the Villa Radiana, and stayed in her glorious cage with her view upon the sparkling sea. Leopold was controlling like that: despite his own moral weaknesses, he jailed one of his daughters for having an affair, refused a widowed daughter to marry again and broke up the impending marriage of a third.

It seems that he loved his young prostitute-turned-Baroness, for they stayed together until his death 10 years later, marrying in a secret ceremony just 4 days before he died. The two children she had were almost certainly his, and as one of the richest men in Europe he left them a vast fortune upon his death. Unfortunately for her, the marriage ceremony was declared null and void and Leopold’s immense wealth passed to his legitimate children and to the Belgian state.

King Leopold’s legacy in the Congo may not bear thinking about, but his legacy on Cap Ferrat is one of beautiful villas and gardens. The palace Villa Leopolda has since been rebuilt but the stunning Villa Les Cedres with its exotic gardens remains. As for Villa Radiana, from the sea it looks much the same as when Baroness Blanche once stood each night and waited for her Leopold- murderer, thief, lover and king- to come calling.

You can’t help but wonder what she must have thought of it all.

13. Paul Signac

Admirer of Monet, mentor of Matisse, confidante of Van Gogh, the career of neo-impressionist painter Paul Signac was heavily influenced by two things: his friendship with George Seurat, and the famed light of the French Riviera.

After leaving school in 1880 upon witnessing an exhibition of Monet’s work, the young Signac met the artist Suerat soon after. The older artist shared his fascination with the science of colour and introduced him to the style of Pointillism (also called Divisionism): the technique of painting small daubs of colour very closely to each other to create a shimmering effect, a kind of optical illusion.

Signac would put this style to unforgettable use when he painted two of his great works depicting the Cote d’Azur- Antibes, Thunderstorms and The Harbour at Saint Tropez.

Those of us who have been lucky enough to pass the ramparts of Antibes on a yacht or come into Saint Tropez by sea will appreciate just how well he captures the character and light of these pretty seaside towns, even well over a century on.

After sailing and travelling much of Europe, Signac left his native Paris shortly after Seurat’s death. Saddened by the loss of his great friend, he moved the sleepy fishing village of Saint Tropez with his wife, where he would paint his famous work, ‘Women at the Well’ and many others.

During these years he turned his hand to other things as well- including writing on art and cultivating an involvement in anarchist politics, hoping to create a more democrat and just society. His art changed in nature over the years, becoming much more free-handed and dabbling in watercolours, and he amassed a great collection of artists’ work that he admired.

While he was regarded very highly by art critics from quite early in his career, it took some time for the rest of the world to catch on- his first solo exhibition was not until 1901. After his star finally rose, he became the President of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, a post he held for 26 years.

Signac repaid Seurat’s kindness as a mentor by taking many young artists under his tutelage, welcoming none other than a young Henri Matisse into his home in Saint Tropez 1904. In fact, Signac was the first owner of Matisse’s work, seeing the artist’s great potential.

At the age of 50, Signac moved to Antibes with his mistress after separating from his wife. He died of septicaemia in Paris in 1935, leaving a saddened art world and some extraordinary works behind him- including one lost piece which was discovered in 2010, hanging on a rusty nail in a Dutch hotel.

a black & white photo of a man writing in a sun chair

14. Graham Greene

Graham Greene, one of the greatest voices of literature of the 20th century, lived in a humble one-bedroom apartment in Antibes for 24 years.

The writer of many critically acclaimed novels including The End of the Affair, The Power and the Glory and The Quiet American had arrived in Antibes in 1965, after the British government apparently gave warning that he had until the end of the year to leave the country to avoid being jailed for tax fraud. If Greene had not been engaged in spying for MI6 it is unlikely that the authorities would have been so lax, and this great literary light may have instead been writing from behind bars.

Rather than a jail cell, Graham Greene chose the narrow cobbled streets and Mediterranean light of Antibes, where he was a common sight each day as he lunched at Café Felix by the archway to the port. Café Felix, made famous by his patronage, has since lost any noticeable charm, but in those days he sat with Yvonne Cloette, a lady ‘friend’ and her dog, Sandy, and drank his customary dry martini without lemon and a bottle of the local Château des Garcinières. (Apparently his fondness for the place was partly due to the waiters keeping whatever was left in the bottle for his return the next day.)

His estranged wife Vivien, living back in England, was long accustomed to his affairs, for Graham had a famous weakness for women. As well as many affairs, he documented no less than 42 encounters with prostitutes. His wife said years later, ‘With hindsight, he was a person who should never have married’, and certainly his more serious writing delved deeply into morality and the struggles of fidelity and the human condition. He wrote to Vivien once that he was ‘a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life’, which does pose certain problems for married bliss.

His writing danced across genres, between serious literature with Catholic tones and espionage thrillers, what he called ‘entertainments’. He was famous for saying ‘every writer should have a chip of ice in his heart’, although he certainly didn’t display this callousness when, in anger at treatment of a female friend in court, he accused the Nicoise authorities of colluding with the local mafia, in a pamphlet called ‘J’accuse-the dark side of Nice.’ An interview with him held in his Antibes apartment at the time of the drama has him overheard on the telephone saying, ‘They'd like to shoot me, I know… They'd like to kill me but I'm too well-known.’ The likely truth of Greene’s accusation was confirmed many years later when the mayor of Nice was jailed for corruption.

He adored Antibes, particularly in the winter months when, as he wrote in May We Borrow Your Husband,

"Gusts of rain blew along the ramparts, and the emaciated statues of the Château Grimaldi dripped with wet, and there was a sound absent in the flat blue days of summer, the continual rustle beneath the ramparts of the small surf. All along the Cote the summer restaurants were closed, but lights shone in Flix au Port, and one Peugot of the latest model stood in the parking-rank. The bare masts of the abandoned yachts stuck up like toothpicks and the last plane in the winter service dropped, in a flicker of green, red and yellow lights, like Christmas tree baubles, towards the airport in Nice. This was the Antibes I always enjoyed, and I was disappointed to find I was not alone in the restaurant as I was most nights in the week.”

Grahame Greene lived in a small apartment, Les Residences des Fleurs, on the Rue Pasteur overlooking the port, and one of his few gripes with Antibes was the noise that came from The Yacht Bar directly below his apartment- a complaint that many Antibes residents before and since can identify with!

You can find a small plaque on the apartment block, which seems somehow understated, for a man who was a true literary great. He left Antibes for Switzerland in his last few years of life, where he died of leukaemia at the age of 82.