Alain Delon, the dark, handsome French leading man who starred in some of the greatest European films of the 1960s and 1970s, has died. He is 88 years old.
“It is with deep sadness that Alain Fabien, Anouchka, Anthony and (his dog) Loubo announce the death of their father. He is peacefully at home in Duchy He died on the ground surrounded by his three children and family,” the family said in a statement released to AFP.
Delong has been in poor health in recent years and suffered a stroke in 2019.
Among his film credits are works by Luchino Visconti Rocco and his brother (1960) and leopard (1963), Rene Clement purple noon (1960), Michelangelo Antonioni eclipse (1962), Joseph Losey Mr. Klein (1976) with Jean-Pierre Melville warrior (1967) and red circle (1970), Delon graced several art films that are now considered classics.
His performances are tense and stoic, often playing seductive men filled with inner turmoil, characterized by sudden outbursts of violence and emotion and the underlying ennui that characterized postwar French and Italian cinema. He is often called the “male Brigitte Bardot”.
Although Delon was a matinee idol in Europe, he never became a star in Hollywood. In 1964, he moved there and signed contracts with MGM and Columbia, making a total of six films. But he failed to make a breakthrough and left in 1967, soon starring in crime films sicilian clan (1969) and borsalino (1970), both films were box office successes in France.
DeLong created about 100 feature films and produced dozens more, but he won few awards during his lifetime. He won only one French César for Bertrand Blier’s 1984 romance our storyin which he played an alcoholic who falls in love with a young woman (Natalie Bay). In 1995, he received the Honorary Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and the Honorary Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019.
The latter award caused controversy, with a petition gaining more than 25,000 signatures protesting his “racism, homophobia and misogyny”. (DeLong told Reuters he was not opposed to same-sex marriage, but did not approve of “two same-sex adoptions,” and that he had “never harassed a woman in my life. However, they harassed me regularly.”)
“You don’t have to agree with me,” the tearful actor told the audience at the Cannes awards ceremony. “But if there’s one thing in this world that I know for sure that I’m truly proud of — just one thing — it’s my career.”
Delon was born on November 8, 1935 in Sault, a suburb south of Paris. His father, Fabien, ran a nearby cinema and his mother, Édith, worked in a pharmacy. After his parents divorced in 1939, he was sent to live with a foster family and then attended Catholic boarding school. He earned a vocational degree and worked briefly in the butcher’s shop owned by his stepfather in Chateau Queene, a suburb of Paris.
At the age of 17, Delon was drafted into the French Navy. He was reprimanded for stealing equipment and sent to Saigon to fight in the First Indochina War, but was fired for stealing and crashing a jeep.
In 1956, Delon settled back in Paris, working odd jobs and frequenting clubs and cafés in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district, where he met Jean-Claude Brialy, who Early New Wave films starring Claude Chabrol handsome sergey. That year, Briari brought Delon to Cannes, where his angelic face caught the attention of David O. Selznick. Delon travels to Rome to audition for film Gone with the wind The producers offered him a seven-year contract on the condition that he improve his English.
Instead, Delon chose to stay in France at the behest of director Yves Allegrete, who offered him his first feature role in the 1957 revenge thriller When the devil fails send a woman. (Allegrete’s wife, the actress Michelle Cordu, recommended him for the role—Delon was her lover at the time.)
“I don’t know what to do,” he told vanity fair Years later, he recounted his first untrained experience in front of the camera at the age of 22. “Yves Allegrete took one look at me and said: ‘Alain, please listen to me carefully: speak like you speak to me. Look like you are looking at me. Sound like you are listening to me. .Don’t act, live. This changes everything.
Delong began to work steadily from then on. In 1958 he starred in the French crime comedy stay beautiful and shut up Jean-Paul Belmondo had an early role as a young thug (the actors would share the screen eight times throughout their careers). That same year, he also played an army lieutenant in a pre-World War I Viennese drama Christine.
The latter stars German actress Romy Schneider. Princess Sissi The eponymous character in the movie), and the on-screen romance between her character and Delon evolved into an actual love story. The couple became engaged the following year and remained together until 1963. swimming pool (1969) and Losey’s Trotsky’s assassination (1972).
DeLonghi’s big breakthrough came in 1960 purple noonadapted by Clement (forbidden games) from Patricia Highsmith’s book the brilliant mr ripley. DeLong plays the charming antihero Tom Ripley, exuding charisma and malevolence in this thriller set against the stunning Mediterranean backdrop. The film was a critical and box office success, with some critics dubbing Delon “the new James Dean”.
The actor went on to star in Visconti’s sprawling family drama Rocco and his brotherplays a poor southern Italian who moves to Milan with his siblings and trains to become a boxing champion. Co-starring Renato Salvatori and Anne Giraldo Rocco Winning the Venice Golden Lion in 1960 further enhanced De’Longhi’s reputation in Europe and overseas. This is only the fifth film in his career.
Alain Delon (playing Tom Ripley) and Marie Laforet in 1970’s “Purple Noon”
Times Film/Photo Festival
Other highlights of the 1960s include Antonioni’s modernist existential romanticism eclipsein which he starred opposite Monica Vitti; Henri Verneuil’s melancholic heist film Any number can win (1963), in which he played an ambitious young gangster alongside French legend Jean Gabin; and Visconti’s Sicilian epic masterpiece leopardstarring Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale. The film won the Palme d’Or at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival and earned DeLong his only Golden Globe nomination.
His output for the rest of the decade included several other memorable works: Alain Cavalier’s stark noir The undefeated (1964), also produced by DeLong; A World War II Saga Is Paris burning? (1966), which reunited him with Clement and featured an international star cast including Orson Welles, Leslie Caron and Kirk Douglas; Del Rey’s sexy three-hander swimming pool (reproduced as bigger splash 2015), with Schneider and Jane Birkin; and Verneuil’s Blow sicilian clan (1969) is a fast-paced French-Italian crime film co-starring Lino Ventura.
In Hollywood, DeLong produced yellow rolls royce (1964), starring Shirley MacLaine; thriller used to be a thief (1965), with Ann Margaret and Jack Palance; starring Dean Martin Across the Texas River (1966); and the Algerian war film lose command (1966), with Anthony Quinn.
Another big role in the Sixties was playing the silent assassin Jeff Costello in Melville’s minimalist noir, warrior. DeLong’s melancholic and beautiful performance as a man of few words was praised by critics, and the role remains one of the most memorable of his career. “This is something beyond me, beyond my existence,” he told the outlet movie notebook in an interview. “The samurai is me, but unconsciously it is me.”
DeLong made more than 30 feature films in the 1970s, but his masterpieces are fewer than in the previous decade. He did manage to reteam with Melville on the crime saga red circlea hit French commercial film now considered one of the greatest heist movies of all time, then a policeman (1972), the director’s last feature film.
He also reunites with Dre in a gangster film set in Marseille borsalinostarring alongside Belmondo, and its follow-up borsalino company (1974); played a professor who falls in love with his student in Valerio Zurlini’s psychodrama Indian Summer (1972); and teamed up with Lancaster again for McWinner’s CIA thriller, Scorpio (1973).
Perhaps DeLong’s most memorable work of the decade was his second collaboration with Losey, Mr. KleinIt tells the story of an amoral art dealer in Nazi-controlled Paris who discovers he has a Jewish doppelgänger. The film, which Delon served as a producer, earned him his first César nomination for Best Actor, as well as the French Best Film and Best Director awards.
Delon entered the fashion business in the late 1970s, launching watches, sunglasses and a line of fragrances called “Shogun” and “Samouraï Woman”.
Starting in the 1980s, he made gradually fewer films. Highlights of the decade include Volker Schlöndorff’s Proust adaptation Swann in love (1984), Blier’s melancholic romance our story (1984) Monk – Luc Godard’s deconstructive neo-noir, new wave (1990).
In 2008, DeLong played Julius Cesar in the comic book blockbuster, a box-office hit. Asterix at the Olympicstotal revenue exceeded $130 million.
After becoming engaged to Schneider in 1959, DeLong became romantically linked to Velvet Underground frontman Nico. She had a child, Christian Aaron Boulogne (born 1962), who Delon denied being the father and was later adopted by the actor’s parents.
In 1964, he married actress Francine Canovas, who changed her name to Nathalie Delon and starred in warriorthat year they gave birth to a son, Anthony.
Delon began a long-term relationship in 1968 with actress Mireille Darc, who starred in Borsalino Movie. In 1987, he began dating Dutch model Rosalie van Breeman, with whom he had two children: Anouchka and Alain-Fabien.
Most recently, his three children feuded over his medical condition and finances, and in February 2024Police later found 72 firearms (he did not have any firearms license) and more than 3,000 rounds of ammunition at his home in Douchy-Montcorbon, south of Paris.
In a 2018 interview le figaroDelong emphasized that he is not an “actor.”
“My career has nothing to do with being an actor,” he said. “Being an actor is a profession. I am an actor… An actor acts, spends years learning his craft, and an actor lives. I always play my roles but never act them. Acting is an accident. I am an accident. My life is an accident.
