Alain Delon, magnetic French film star who projected a moral ambivalence on screen and in life – obituary
Alain Delon, who has died aged 88, was one of the most prominent and magnetic French actors of the post-war era; his dazzling good looks and his lack of formal training sometimes led people to underrate his talents as an actor, yet there were few better equipped to portray enigmatic and morally corrupted youth.
At the height of his powers, Delon, with his piercing blue eyes, high cheekbones and delinquent vitality, was considered, as Time magazine described him, “the most handsome man in the world”.
He was often described as “the French Sinatra” and, as a young man, told friends that the great American crooner, notorious for his underworld associations, was his idol. “I can’t open a drawer,” Delon’s first wife Nathalie complained in a French television documentary, “without finding a gun in it.”
Delon was seldom troubled by self-doubt. He was one of the first international stars to “brand” himself, first with a range of fragrances, clothes and sunglasses and later, by allowing the marketing of “Alain Delon” cigarettes.
He drifted into acting in the early 1950s, working with many New Wave directors and appearing in international productions. He possessed an icy impassivity, projecting a moral ambivalence that enabled him to switch from sadist to seducer with barely a twitch – a duality which Jean-Luc Godard exploited when he cast Delon as a pair of polar opposite twins in Nouvelle Vague (1990).
His breakthrough came with René Clément’s stylish Plein Soleil (1960), an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley, in which Delon’s portrayal of the psychopathic charmer who attempts to take on the personality of his victim seemed to draw on something deep in his own psychological make-up.
The part called for an actor capable of conveying unusual levels of amorality, bravado and self-love. They had come to the right man.
He also gave tremendous performances as Tancredi, the Prince’s son, in Luchino Visconti’s Il Gattopardo (“The Leopard”) and in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samoura? (1967), in which he gave a masterclass in the art of expressionless menace as the hitman whose latest contract killing is witnessed by a beautiful nightclub pianist (played by Cathy Rosier).
In 1968, the Delons found themselves at the centre of scandal when their Yugoslav friend and bodyguard, Stefan Markovic, was found shot dead in a sack on a rubbish tip. The subsequent investigation threatened to implicate many of France’s most prominent celebrities and politicians, including President Georges Pompidou and his wife, in a scandal of sex, drugs and murder.
Although Delon was eventually cleared of all suspicion, the crime was never solved and the whiff of corruption lingered. Many predicted that his career would not survive.
Instead, he exploited the scandal and boosted his stock among continental filmgoers by implying that the gangsters, killers and sexual deviants he portrayed on screen were based on his off-screen life. In interviews he admitted homosexual liaisons and a more than passing acquaintance with France’s seamy underworld.
Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon was born on November 8 1935 and grew up in Sceaux, a middle-class suburb of Paris. His father Fabien, who ran the local cinema, was of Corsican descent. Delon’s mother Edith, nicknamed “Mounette”, worked in a pharmacy.
The couple divorced when their only child was three. A year later Edith married Paul Boulogne, a pork butcher. Delon never came to terms with Fabien’s departure, and later, in his interviews, the theme of paternal abandonment would recur.
He was dispatched to boarding school aged eight, and was expelled by successive institutions. “They all threw him out,” his mother recalled. “The only subject he liked was sport. Academically he was typically 43rd out of 44.”
Delon fared no better in his brief apprenticeship as a pork butcher. After applying unsuccessfully to be a test pilot, he joined the French navy, reporting to Brest in 1953.
Already known to police in connection with petty offences, he left for Indochina as a wireless operator. He was discharged after stealing a military jeep and spent his 20th birthday in prison. On his return to France, he served a further 45 days near Toulon for stealing a gun in Saigon.
Returning to freedom and civilian life in 1956, Delon decamped to Pigalle, Paris’s red-light district, where, he told Le Figaro, “I lived off my looks, supported by ladies of the quartier.” He also took odd jobs, including working as a porter in Les Halles market in Paris and as a butcher’s assistant.
Moving to Marseille, he befriended a young actor who invited him to the Cannes Film Festival, where he was noticed by his future agent, Georges Beaume. “Everybody in Cannes stared at the boy,” said Beaume. Delon’s striking good looks won him several offers and he accepted a small part in Yves Allegret’s Quand la Femme S’en Mele (“Send a Woman When the Devil Fails”, 1957) followed by Sois Belle Et Tais-Toi (“Be Beautiful But Shut Up”, 1958).
His first lead was in Christine (1958), opposite Romy Schneider. After Plein Soleil he was Rocco, the self-sacrificing brother, a sensitive young boxer in Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi Fratelli (“Rocco and his Brothers”, 1960) and appeared on stage, with Romy Schneider, in John Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore, also directed by Visconti. Delon was engaged for three years to the actress; they remained close friends until her death in 1982.
In 1961 he had a one-night stand with Nico, the German singer, who bore Delon a son, Ari. Delon denied paternity, but his mother Edith adopted Ari when he was two and brought him up; the actor cut off almost all contact with his mother, although he was by her side at the end of her life, in 1995.
Also in 1961 he teamed up with René Clement in Che Gioia Vivere, (“The Joy of Living”) followed by an appearance with Brigitte Bardot in Les Amours célèbres. The following year he starred in Michelangelo Antonioni’s brilliant L’Eclisse as a glamorous stock market trader who falls into a giddy and anxious affair with Monica Vitti.
In Melodie En Sous-Sol (“Any Number Can Win”, 1963), he and Jean Gabin played two thieves plotting to rob a Riviera casino. In 1964 he produced and acted in Les Felins (“Joy House”) later establishing his own film company, Adel Productions.
In 1965 Delon moved to Hollywood, where he appeared in several films that failed to do full justice to his talents. Returning to Europe in 1967, he was Marianne Faithfull’s love interest in Girl on a Motorcycle, a film that won him a large female following in Britain.
His devilish reputation enhanced by the Markovic scandal, Delon went on to appear in numerous money-spinning gangster films, including Jean Herman’s Jeff and Henri Verneuil’s Le Clan des Siciliens (1969).
In Jacques Deray’s Borsalino (1970) he was a small-time gangster who, with Jean Paul Belmondo, becomes king of the Marseille underworld, and in Melville’s film noir Le Cercle Rouge (1970), he played a small time crook recently released from prison who joins up with Gian-Maria Volonté’s escaped career criminal to plan a raid on a jewellery store.
By the 1970s, Delon was France’s biggest star. In La Veuve Couderc (1970) he played a handsome drifter hired by a frumpy widow (Simone Signoret) to work on her farm; in Un Flic (also known as “Dirty Money”, 1972) he played opposite Catherine Deneuve as a police commissioner on the trail of a drug syndicate. Other credits at this time include Zorro (1974) and Michael Winner’s Scorpio (1973).
In the mid-1970s, he had had an unhappy spell as a boxing entrepreneur, promoting his friend Carlos Monzón, the Argentine middleweight, who ended up getting 11 years for the defenestration of his wife.
Delon won critical acclaim for his performance in the title role of Joseph Losey’s Mr Klein (1976), a sinister profiteer who specialises in buying art on the cheap from Jews fleeing Vichy France, only to find that a Jewish stranger is slowly taking over his identity. The film, which Delon also produced, won a César for best picture.
In 1981, Delon turned to directing with Pour la Peau d’un Flic (“For a Cop’s Hide”), in which he played a down-on-his-luck private eye hired to track down a young blind woman. In 1984 he co-starred with Jeremy Irons as Baron de Charlus in Volker Schl?ndorff’s acclaimed Swann in Love.
The same year he won the only César, for his performance as a middle-aged garage owner, a slovenly drunk captivated by an alluring stranger, in Notre Histoire. In 1985 he produced, wrote, starred in and composed a song for Parole de Flic (aka “Cop’s Honour”), in which he played a tough ex-cop tracking down his daughter’s murderers.
After poor reviews (and takings) for Le Passage (1986), however, Delon began to be more choosy about his projects and, during the 1990s, concentrated increasingly on various business ventures. In Le Retour de Casanova (1992) he mocked his own screen legend in the role of an ageing seducer who finds that, now his beauty has faded, he must rely on his wits.
When critics panned his appearance with Jean Paul Belmondo in 1 Chance Sur 2 (1998) he announced his retirement from acting. He was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 1991 and and Officier in 2005.
A keen art connoisseur and collector, on his estate outside Paris Delon bred racehorses and looked after abandoned dogs. He was a friend and admirer of the French National Front leader, “my friend, Jean-Marie Le Pen”, although his nationalism did not prevent him seeking tax exile status in Switzerland and taking Swiss nationality in 1999.
His often expressed indifference to the human race (as early as 1964 he was proclaiming how much he preferred dogs to people). In old age he appeared tormented, resentful and dissatisfied. Despite his Swiss citizenship he lived mainly on his sprawling estate at Douchy, south of Paris, protected by guard dogs, high fences and cameras.
The quality of performances towards the end of his career tarnished the glory of his earlier work. He appeared in Le jour et la nuit (“Day and night”, 1997). Written by the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, it is a contender for the title of worst French movie ever made. Despite having announced his retirement in 1999, he resurfaced intermittently until he bade his definitive farewell in 2012 in a derided Russian production, Hello Mums! His appearance as Julius Caesar in Asterix at the Olympic Games, four years earlier, had done no more to elevate his declining stock.
At the 2019 Cannes Film Festival Delon received an honorary Palme d’Or. However the same year he was disabled by a stroke, an event which precipitated bitter feuds with his children over the role of Hiromi Rollin, a Japanese former film production assistant who moved in with him in 2019 and whom the children accused of using her influence to isolate their father and make him dependent on her.
In 2023 they succeeded in evicting her from his home only to turn on each other in a public exchange of mutual grievances, insults, accusations, lawsuits and secret recordings. Most commentators seemed to agree that the rift was not about money, but about sibling rivalry for paternal love.
Delon’s first marriage, to Nathalie Barthélemy, was dissolved in 1968. In 1969 he began a 15-year relationship with the actress Mireille Darc, then in 1987 he married Rosalie Van Breemen; they parted in 2002.
He is survived by his son from his first marriage and his daughter and son with Rosalie Van Breemen. Ari, his son from his relationship with Nico, died last year after a lifetime struggling with drug addiction.
Alain Delon, born November 8 1935, died August 18 2024
