Alain Delon, the French actor of intense presence and wide appeal who, working with some of the most revered European directors of the 20th century, played everything from Corsican gangsters to passionate Italian lovers, has died aged 88.
According to a statement from his family to French news agency AFP, Delon died in the early hours of Sunday at his home in Douchy-Montcorbon.
Hours later, President Emmanuel Macron honoured him in a social media post, saying: “Melancholic, popular, reserved, he was more than a star: a French monument.”
During his heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, Delon was a top international figure, highly paid and frequently sought out by the great filmmakers of the day.
When he broke into the gangster genre with his role as a sad-eyed, saintly young brother in Rocco and His Brothers (1960), the director was Luchino Visconti. Two years later, in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (“Eclipse”), he played a handsome stockbroker. Le Samouraï (1967), released in the United States under the title The Godson, and the jewel-heist film Le Cercle Rouge (1970), in which Delon was a sinister, moustached ex-convict, were both directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, a key figure in the French New Wave.
Louis Malle directed Delon’s segment in Histoires Extraordinaires (1968), based on three stories by Edgar Allan Poe. In Jacques Deray’s La Piscine (1969), Delon played a character who casually murders a guest. He also worked with Deray in Borsalino (1970), where he co-starred with Jean-Paul Belmondo as a Marseille mob boss. Decades later, he appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague (1990).
Delon was already past the height of his fame when he won the César for Best Actor, the French equivalent of the Oscar, for his role as a middle-aged alcoholic in Bertrand Blier’s drama Our Story (1984). That same year, he played an atypical role for him, as the sensual gay aristocrat Baron de Charlus in Swann in Love, based on Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
His image and appeal varied depending on the public’s point of view. In Japan, he was considered a Western star for such films as Red Sun (1971) with Toshiro Mifune. In Europe, he excelled in brutal police dramas, although he also had success in other genres. He starred in Mr. Klein (1976), winner of the Best French Film award, playing a wartime German art dealer who is threatened by being mistaken for a Jewish man of the same name.
American critics often saw him as just a “pretty boy.” Vincent Canby’s New York Times review of Le Samouraï described his character as a “beautiful misfit” and praised Delon for “doing what he does best (looking impassive and slightly washed-out).”
Yet Delon’s beauty was one reason her appeal endured. Her “beauty has long inspired paroxysms of ecstasy,” Manohla Dargis wrote in April, when the independent cinema Film Forum in Manhattan presented a retrospective of her films.
In 1965, Delon told the British magazine Film and Filming that filming scenes of intimate physical contact was “a bore to me – love scenes, kissing scenes”. He explained at the time: “I prefer to fight”. But in 1970, when questioned by The Times on the same subject, he added: “I prefer to make love at home.”
Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon was born on November 8, 1935, in Sceaux, France, a wealthy suburb of Paris. His parents, Fabien and Édith (Arnold) Delon, divorced when he was 4 years old.
During his childhood, Delon had discipline problems and was expelled from several schools. The situation continued when he joined the French Navy in his late teens. During his military service, which included the First Indochina War, he spent almost a year in prison for various infractions before receiving a dishonorable discharge in 1956. One of his infractions, he told television host Dick Cavett in 1970, was stealing a Jeep.
In 1957, his life took a dramatic turn. After working in various jobs (at one point helping his stepfather, a butcher) and without a clear career plan, he happened to accompany a friend, the actress Brigitte Auber, to the Cannes Film Festival, where he was discovered by an agent of the American producer David O. Selznick. He was soon offered a contract, conditional on his studying English. However, before he could move to Hollywood, he received an offer from the director Yves Allégret and decided to stay in France.
Delon’s first credited role was in Allégret’s When Women Interfere (1957), but it was his performance in René Clément’s Plein Soleil (1960), based on the Patricia Highsmith novel and remade in the United States almost 40 years later as The Talented Mr. Ripley, that captured the public’s attention.
Delon played Tom Ripley, a penniless but shrewd young man who surrounds himself with rich, amoral friends and takes revenge on them. Delon’s image on the screen was dazzling: bright blue eyes, long eyelashes, reddish-blond hair falling over his forehead, and an attitude that could change instantly. Many viewers compared him to James Dean, the American idol who had died five years earlier.
As Dargis wrote in April, her “stardom was sealed the moment Ripley removed her shirt and exposed her chest.”
Despite turning down Selznick’s offer, Delon was always candid about his desire to achieve Hollywood stardom in addition to international success. In 1965, he told the Los Angeles Times that he considered America “the summit, the last step, a kind of consecration.” However, that dream never materialized.
His first British film, The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), did well at the box office, but as part of an international cast, his role as a photographer-gigolo went largely unnoticed. He subsequently made more than half a dozen American films, including Once a Thief (1965) and Texas Across the River (1966), but none were hits.
For American film buffs, Delon’s best-known film was probably Il Gattopardo (1963). Although it also starred Burt Lancaster, the film, based on the novel by aristocrat Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, was an international production directed by Visconti.
Delon’s final work was The Concorde… Airport ’79 (1979), in which he played George Kennedy’s dapper co-pilot on a perpetually endangered SST aircraft.
In 1968, Stevan Markovic, a former bodyguard of Delon, was murdered and found in a landfill near the actor’s home in a Paris suburb. The investigation sparked a scandal over alleged sex parties involving both Delon and senior political officials. Although Delon was questioned by police and an accomplice was charged, the case was never solved.
Delon has shown comfort in controversy, making public statements suggesting homophobia and racism. In 2019, the Daily Beast referred to his “notorious misogyny and problematic politics” when he was awarded the honorary Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
Mr. Delon was inducted into the Legion of Honour in 1991. For many years he was also a successful businessman, marketing his name for a variety of products.
He was married only once, to Nathalie Barthélémy (whose name at the time of the marriage was Francine Canovas), from 1964 to 1969, but led a life of serial monogamy. He had long-term romantic relationships with several women, including Romy Schneider, his frequent co-star, from 1958 to 1963; Mireille Darc, an actress and model, from 1969 to 1982; and Rosalie van Breemen, a Dutch model, from 1987 to 2002.
He is survived by a son, Anthony, from his marriage, as well as two children from his relationship with Mrs. van Breemen: a son, Alain-Fabien, and a daughter, Anouchka.
The three children had been locked in a bitter dispute over the medical treatment of Mr. Delon, whose health had deteriorated since he suffered a stroke in 2019.
Delon had denied paternity of a third child, Christian Aaron Päffgen—later known as Ari Boulogne—from a brief relationship with pop star Nico. Delon’s mother raised the boy as her grandson, giving him her surname from a new marriage. Ari Boulogne died in 2023.
In the 2000s, most of Delon’s on-screen appearances were on French television. He announced his retirement from film on several occasions. After an eight-year absence, he appeared in Roman tunic and laurel wreath as Julius Caesar in the historical comedy Asterix at the Olympic Games (2008).
His last feature film was a 2012 Russian-language comedy-drama, S Novym Godom, Mamy! (“Happy New Year, Moms!”), in which he played himself. He repeated this formula in 2019 in Toute Ressemblance, a comedy-drama.
Perhaps most importantly, La Piscine was restored and re-released in 2021, scheduled for two weeks at Film Forum. The film was so popular that it played throughout the summer. Contemporary critics praised the film’s “unapologetic decadence” and Delon’s “sexy, elegant” style, as well as the “touch of menace” he brought.
Often criticized for his unbridled egotism, Delon seemed able to see fame as the complicated illusion that it was.
“This madness reaches such a point that ‘Delon’ becomes a label,” he said in a 1991 television interview published on The Connexion, a Monegasque news site. “And you have to remain that way, play it, stay and live in it, because the public wants it, because you love it a little and because that’s the rule.”
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