Isabelle Adjani preferred not to look at her grandfather's birth certificate, which we brought to her. She preferred to have it read aloud. Mohammed Bensalah Hadjami was born on May 22, 1898, in Philippeville, now Skikda, in Algeria. The actress had always heard him referred to by another first name, Saïd, and had never seen a single photo of him. She was shocked to learn that the term "indigène" (a colonial term meaning "native" and referring to non-European subjects of the French Empire) appeared in parentheses beneath his name. At that time, French citizenship was denied to Muslim populations. He was from the Kabylia region in northern Algeria, meaning he was from the Berber ethnic group.

The surname "Hadjami" is typically Algerian. It lost two letters when, a quarter of a century later, Mohammed Chérif Adjani, the actress's father, was born in 1923 in Constantine. "You get off lightly if you are born in the 1920s in French Algeria and only lose a letter or two from your name," said historian Benjamin Stora, a specialist in the region's history. "You could have lost your entire name."

Two missing letters amounted to an act of scorn and negligence for a father. For his daughter, "that name has become a kind of pseudonym," she said. A name that now sounds different. It has become a star's name; an embodied name written in capital letters for decades on posters, in films and on stages. It's as if the peremptory decision of a civil servant in Algeria, instead of disfiguring it, revealed it.

Meteoric rise

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