From César Awards to controversy, the Washington Post looks back on the French actor’s life and work, including the murderous Tom Ripley in Purple Noon.
Alain Delon, the French actor who achieved international stardom in roles that pitted his luminous beauty against his characters’ dark souls, has died at 88.
In a statement to Agence France-Presse, his family said he died at his home in Douchy, north-central France. No other details were immediately available. He had been in poor health since a stroke in 2019.
Delon, who vaulted to fame with his performance as the murderous opportunist Tom Ripley in Purple Noon (1960), was sometimes called “the male Brigitte Bardot” for his smouldering good looks. Like his Gallic female counterpart, he never found an English role that fully captured his seductive power but he nonetheless had an ardent global following. He became one of the most photographed men in the world, an unavoidable object of desire for decades.
His charming smile, classically handsome features, prizefighter’s sinewy build, electric blue eyes, dark bouffant hair, arched eyebrows and seductively unbuttoned shirts against his bronzed skin gave him an aura of rakish sexuality. He had an unnerving presence – almost feminine prettiness and tough-guy masculinity, angel as devil.
The first film to tap into his charisma was director Rene Clement’s Purple Noon, about a social climber on the Riviera whose envy of a rich friend gives rise to a murder-and-impersonation scheme. (Matt Damon starred in the 1999 remake, The Talented Mr. Ripley, which kept the title of Patricia Highsmith’s source-material novel.)
Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti brought out other sides of Delon, casting him as an injured innocent in Rocco and His Brothers (1960), an acclaimed family tragedy set in Milan, and as a wily political manoeuvrer to Burt Lancaster’s aged prince Don Fabrizio in The Leopard (1963), about the sunset of the Italian aristocracy.
Delon also starred, with Monica Vitti, in filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Eclipse (1962), one of the director’s studies of alienation among the European smart set. But it was in popular crime dramas – among them Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967) and Le Cercle Rouge (1970) – that Delon created his most enduring persona, as a criminal lurking behind a sharp wardrobe and placid facade.
“Few French stars have been as ruthless as Delon onscreen,” Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Wilmington wrote in 2003, “yet few can also radiate such odd, bruised tenderness, even as a villain.”
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.Off-screen, Delon’s blessed-by-the-gods looks masked a life of semi-delinquency and romantic turmoil. He was abandoned by his parents, kicked out of Catholic schools for rowdy behavior and dishonorably discharged from the military. While scrounging for work, he befriended actors (which led to his accidental screen career) and criminals (which led to scandal).
A notorious cad, he terminated his six-year relationship with movie star Romy Schneider by sending her a red rose and a card inscribed, “Je regrette”. He was widely reported to have fathered a son in 1962 with Velvet Underground singer and Andy Warhol muse Nico but denied paternity – a claim muddied by the fact that his mother raised the child.
He professed a loathing of authority and enjoyed a long friendship with Corsican mobster Francois Marcantoni. That relationship brought intense police and media scrutiny after the killing of Delon’s Yugoslav bodyguard-valet Stevan Markovic, whose beaten, bullet-riddled body was discovered in a rubbish dump near Paris in 1968.
In a letter to his brother, Markovic had written that “if I get killed, it’s 100% the fault of Alain Delon and his godfather Francois Marcantoni”. (Marcantoni was arrested but was released after 11 months when his guilt could not be established. Delon was interrogated several times but never charged. The killing remained unsolved.)
The “Markovic affair” generated wild and unsubstantiated stories that Markovic had orchestrated an orgy-and-blackmail scheme involving Delon’s “jet set” friends and French political figures, such as Claude Pompidou, the elegant wife of Georges Pompidou, who was French president at the time. Pompidou ordered an overhaul of the French espionage service, which he blamed for spreading gossip about his wife with the intent of damaging him politically.
Delon emerged from the slew of tawdry headlines more popular than ever with the French moviegoing public. “It could have ruined my career,” he told American talk-show host Dick Cavett in 1970, “but it did the opposite, in fact.” That year, he produced and starred with Jean-Paul Belmondo in Borsalino, a gangster drama set in the 1930s. It became a box-office phenomenon, propelled by Delon’s notoriety as well as its blood-splattering violence and its stylish presentation of vintage cars and snappy haberdashery (the title refers to a noted Italian hatmaker).
Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon was born in Sceaux, a Paris suburb, on November 8, 1935. At the time, his father managed a cinema and his mother worked in a pharmacy. He was 4 when the marriage ended in a bitter divorce.
“My parents got rid of me,” he told Paris Match magazine. “I found myself with a foster family like an orphan. Both of them came running back to me when I was famous. All of a sudden they remembered they had a son.”
He quit school at 14 and worked as an apprentice to his stepfather, a butcher, until his parents signed papers enlisting him in the French Marines when he was 17. “It was them getting rid of me a second time,” he told Paris Match.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.Seasickness led to his transfer to an army unit, where his mischief-making – he once stole a jeep and drove it into a river – led to frequent disciplinary measures. He said he saw combat in Indochina but he also spent 11 months in the brig.
By early 1956, he was out of the military and penniless. He was working as a porter at Les Halles, the Parisian produce market, when he was invited by actor friends to the Cannes Film Festival in 1957. He was so poor he had to borrow a suit.
An American talent scout was impressed by his appearance and got him a seven-year contract with producer David O. Selznick, contingent on his learning English. The actor turned it down on the advice of a French film director, Yves Allegret, who then cast him in the crime drama Send a Woman When the Devil Fails (1957).
“I had no idea what to do,” Delon later told GQ magazine. “Allegret stared at me, just like that, and told me: ‘Listen to me, Alain. Speak as you are speaking to me. Stare as you are staring at me. Listen as you are listening to me. Don’t act. Live.’ It changed everything.”
By his third film, the costume drama Christine (1958), opposite Schneider, he was a full-fledged star. Reviewers were seldom kind to Delon, who contended that he was being judged by his appearance.
“I have been fighting for 10 years to make people forget that I am just a pretty boy with a beautiful face,” he told the publication Film and Filming as his career progressed. “I want the public to realise that above all I am an actor, a very professional one who loves every minute of being in front of the camera, but who becomes very miserable the instant the director shouts, ‘Cut!’”
The French hit Any Number Can Win (1963) – a casino robbery caper set in Nice – was the first of the crime dramas that helped him create a grittier persona, one that resonated widely with audiences.
Among his crime movie highlights were the heist story The Sicilian Clan (1969) and the anti-capital-punishment drama Two Men in Town (1973), which gave him one of his most sympathetic roles, as a parolee who is harassed by a detective.
Delon said his finest acting work was in Mr Klein (1976), a drama set during the Nazi occupation of France. He played an amoral Paris art dealer who gets his comeuppance when he is mistaken for a Jew. He won a best actor César Award, the French equivalent of an Oscar, for Our Story (1984), portraying an alcoholic desperate to find the alluring stranger (Nathalie Baye) with whom he had an affair in a train compartment.
One of his later films was The Return of Casanova (1992), in which the 18th-century Italian seducer’s faded looks force him to rely on his wits. The movie played into Delon’s reputation for maintaining an energetic love life.
His marriage to actress and model Francine Canovas, also known as Nathalie Delon, ended in divorce. From 1968 to 1982, he was the companion of French actress Mireille Darc. He and Rosalie van Breemen, a Dutch model three decades his junior, lived together from 1987 to 2001.
In addition to denying that he had fathered Christian “Ari” Paeffgen with Nico, Delon had strained relationships with the children he recognised. His survivors include a son, Anthony, from his first marriage and two children with van Breemen: Anouchka and Alain-Fabien, who received a suspended sentence in 2013 after accidentally shooting and seriously wounding another teenager during a party at Delon’s apartment in Geneva.
Delon produced several of his films from the 1970s and he became exceedingly wealthy. He also lent his name to a popular line of perfumes and luxury goods. A critic of high French taxes, he acquired Swiss citizenship in 2000 and remained aligned with France’s far-right National Front party. He tried without success to block publication of biographies that probed his underworld connections and personal troubles.
He once told an interviewer “it was a huge piece of luck that I became an actor. Otherwise, I’d have ended up in Fresnes or Fleury-Mérogis” – two Paris prisons. “I’ve remained a child. All my life I’ve played at being Delon. And I know it.”
This article originally appeared in The Washington Post.
As Seen On Screen
From Hollywood stars and indie icons to the best flicks of the year.
Remember Gena Rowlands For The Raw & Elegant Drama She Brought To Her Roles. Known for playing on-the-verge characters, Gena Rowlands twice earned Oscar nominations for her work in films directed by John Cassavetes, her husband.
Hunter Schafer Has Wurst Brat Summer In Kooky Alps Horror Film ‘Cuckoo’. In her first lead movie role, the Euphoria star is a bloody believable heroine.
Bookworm: Costume Designer On Working With Ant Timpson & Battling The Elements. Jaindra Watson explains how Elijah Wood escaped wearing a fedora.
NZ director’s Good One delivers quiet drama in the depths of the woods. This debut feature film from New Zealand-born director India Donaldson is an insightful look at quiet betrayals and learning to trust your gut.
Director Sasha Rainbow On The Gory Horrors Of Beauty Standards & Filming ‘Grafted’. Horror has always been a genre that captures the terror of women.
