Napoleon, Ridley Scott’s film, had a spectacular preview a few days ago at the Prado Museum in Madrid. There were many recognized faces who gathered at the place, but the one who did not want to miss this event in any way was the director’s wife, the actress Giannina Facio. Both posed happily in front of the cameras, and even attended to the press. However, the actress was already an old acquaintance of the gossip press before this moment. And it was in 1980 when a photograph of Carolina Grimaldi’s then husband, the French playboy Philippe Junot, was published, holding his hand at the Istanbul airport.
“I love Miguel,” she responded to the press when at the film’s photocall a journalist asked her about her relationship with the singer Miguel Bosé. “He was my boyfriend and we became very close friends. I want to send him a thousand kisses,” he expressed then. But as we said, she was not the interpreter of Bambú and Como un lobo who made her hit the headlines in the world of the gossip press. Giannina was photographed in the early 1980s with Philippe Junot, then husband of Carolina Grimaldi, princess of Monaco.
That story was described as a “summer adventure” by Facio herself. However, that adventure caused the princess of Monaco to separate from Phillippe, whom she had married a couple of years before. “When Junot invited me to go with him to Turkey, he obviously knew what he was doing,” Facio explained in this regard. “So, I wonder now if it wasn’t Junot who put me on display, so that the court of Monaco would get angry and announce the breakup of his marriage with Carolina,” she said.
It was then said that Caroline of Monaco had married Junot against the will of her parents, especially Princess Grace, who wanted someone better for her daughter. “Love is blind, but the photographers’ objectives are not,” said Basilio Rogado in his book Negocios del corazón. “Carolina and Philippe got married five years after they met, and the union was precipitated when Carolina was photographed topless and in unorthodox positions next to her boyfriend on the Côte d’Azur, specifically in Saint Jean Cap Ferrat,” said Rogado. .
The affair between Facio and Junot increased the popularity of the Costa Rican artist. The actress’s father, Gonzalo Facio, was Minister of Foreign Affairs of Costa Rica and later worked as a lawyer. At the age of sixteen, Facio met the man who three years later would become her husband (she had already divorced him when she was twenty-one), and then she began posing for men’s magazines.
According to his version, he met Junot for the first time in New York, during a dinner organized by Peppo Vanini, co-founder of the Xenon nightclub, where the two would end up dancing together that night. Then they met on several more occasions, always in the United States. “Philippe was invited to take the same cruise as me, departing from Izmir,” she explained to a magazine.
“It had been planned for several months. To my great surprise, I met Philippe at Roissy airport. We made the trip together. But it was not until our arrival in Istanbul that the photographers rushed at Philippe. I left his side to limit suspicions, but the photographs of the two together had already been taken,” he explained, about those images that blew everything up in the air.
The romance between the two had no further development, but she and Philippe remained friends. “Philippe is one of the most interesting, fantastic and divine men the world has ever produced. I adore him,” she once said. She also had an affair with Julio Iglesias, and as we said before, also with Miguel Bosé. In 2000 she met Ridley Scott, who was eighteen years older than her, and they remained together ever since. The two married in June 2015, and their love story continues to this day.
