Farewell to an icon of cinema and beauty. Alain Delon has died at the age of 88. His three children announced the news to the French press agency France Presse. Struck by a stroke in 2019, he had also been suffering from a serious lymphoma for some time. “Alain Fabien, Anouchka, Anthony, as well as (his dog) Loubo, announce with immense sadness the passing of their father,” reads the press release. “He died peacefully at his home in Douchy, surrounded by his three children and his family. His family kindly asks that his privacy be respected, in this moment of extremely painful mourning.”
Born in 1935, the son of a small cinema manager and a saleswoman, who were separated, Alain Delon worked as a butcher’s clerk and at 17 he enlisted in the French navy. In 1953 he was assigned to the expeditionary force in South-East Asia, a group involved in the Indochina War. Discharged in 1956, the future star began to frequent the Parisian scene, meeting intellectuals and stars of the entertainment world. He acted in the theatre until his beauty and virtues were noticed by some film producers. Thus began the brilliant career of Alain Delon, who achieved worldwide fame in the 1960s acting in “Rocco and His Brothers”, “The Leopard”, “The Eclipse”.
A favorite of Luchino Visconti, he was the protagonist in his masterpieces from “Rocco and His Brothers” to “The Leopard”. Alternating throughout his career between auteur cinema – starting with “L’eclisse” by Michelangelo Antonioni where he starred alongside Monica Vitti – and commercial cinema, Delon was directed in his homeland by directors such as René Clement, Jean-Pierre Melville and Jacques Deray who highlighted his cold and cynical gaze, in contrast with his angelic face, also making him the ideal interpreter of the noir anti-hero of many detective stories. For Melville he was the Italian-American mafioso Frank Costello in “Frank Costello Face of an Angel”; he played the gangster Roger Startet in “The Sicilian Clan” by Henry Verneuil and “Zorro” in Duccio Tessari’s film. In 1995, at the Berlin Film Festival, he received the deserved recognition for his talent: the Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement, while only in 2019 did the Cannes Film Festival award him the Palme d’Or for Lifetime Achievement; and in the meantime, in 2012, he had been awarded the Pardo for Lifetime Achievement at the Locarno Film Festival.
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