Sad news for the Ventura family… Laurent, the only son of cinema idol Lino Ventura, died at the age of 72 after a long fight against illness, according to an announcement from his relatives, including Purepeople got confirmation. Born in 1950, the man was married and had several children but it was out of the question for him to follow in the footsteps of his famous dad: uncomfortable with media coverage, he preferred to turn to the pen and notably released a book on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of the actor, in 2019.
A rather enriching exercise for him, as he had declared to the Cinema Daily. “It was very fun to bring all these testimonies together and to pay tribute to him in this way, that’s what I liked. This approach is a bit out of the ordinary and we noticed that many people wanted to testify even outside the cinema.“, he had told. He added that a biography would not have interested him: “I was offered to do it because it was the hundredth anniversary of his birth. The man with whom I made this book, whose name is Luciano Melis, worked very attentively and carefully on this project and had the idea of having people testify. It’s a book of testimonies and that’s why it’s interesting“.
A big family… totally divided
His death must of course affect his wife, Marie-Laure, as well as his little sister, Clélia. Born in 1961, she was close to her older brother, although she decided to follow in her famous father’s footsteps in the cinema, where she eventually became a screenwriter (she also released several books on his father, like him). Together, they had also led a long battle for the legacy of the actor.
Indeed, the children of their sister Mylène (who died in 1998 in a plane crash) had disputed the distribution of the inheritance of Lino Ventura and his wife Odette Lecomte, who died in 2013. For them, indeed, their uncle and their aunt had been able to take advantage of more than 600,000 euros even before the death of Lino Ventura’s wife and had taken advantage of a “one way inheritance“…
The conclusion of this long story, which then ended in court with a judicial administrator, had not been publicized. The family also has another important member: Linda, born in 1958, disabled for life after a stroke at birth. Very protected by her parents, she still lives in the Perce-Neige house that they had created for people with the same disability as her in the early 1960s.