(Bloomberg) -- Alain Delon, the French movie star whose heartthrob image and James Dean-like persona made him one of his nation’s most celebrated actors, has died. He was 88.
The actor died “peacefully” at his house in Douchy, in France’s Loiret department, Agence France-Presse reported, citing Delon’s children.
French President Emmanuel Macron called Delon a “monument” in a post on X, adding he played “legendary roles and made the world dream.”
Since his first movie in 1957, Delon was a near-constant presence in French cinema and fan magazines, on par with rival and occasional acting partner Jean-Paul Belmondo. Delon was typically cast as a handsome rebel or gangster, coldly aloof and even a bit sinister.
His “watery blue eyes,” the New York Times noted in 1970, “are to France what Paul Newman’s are to the United States.”
In France, Delon appeared in some 80 films and made-for-TV series, many of them police or action dramas. A sex symbol known as the male Brigitte Bardot, Delon was dubbed the “pretty-boy killer” for his striking looks and roles. Critics said his most distinguished works were playing a hitman in The Samurai (1967) and a master thief in The Red Circle (1970) with film noir director Jean-Pierre Melville.
Delon himself rated Monsieur Klein (1976), in which he played the title character — an unscrupulous art dealer — as his finest role. The movie, directed by Joseph Losey, won three Cesar awards, France’s national film honor.
In the US, he was best known for his roles in Is Paris Burning? (1966), the epic about Adolf Hitler’s threat to destroy Paris in World War II, and in Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1963). He also starred in The Yellow Rolls Royce (1964), The Sicilian Clan (1969) and Borsalino (1970).
“I am handsome. And it seems, my darling, that I was very, very, very, very handsome indeed,” he told GQ magazine’s British edition in 2018. “The women were all obsessed with me. From when I was 18 ‘til when I was 50.”
Even as his movie career began to wane, he continued to appear in French magazines, such as the mass-circulation glossy Paris Match, which featured him on its cover more than 40 times.
Turbulent Life
Increasingly reclusive in his later years, Delon described himself as difficult and quick-tempered, and his life was as turbulent as his roles.
He received the honorary Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019 despite protests over his acknowledgment of having slapped women in the past and his stated opposition to the adoption of children by same-sex parents.
He was romantically involved with several movie stars, including Romy Schneider and Mireille Darc. He had three children and denied paternity of a fourth, Christian Aaron “Ari” Boulogne, whose mother was the late German model Nico, who sang with the US rock group the Velvet Underground and struggled with heroin addition. Born in 1962, the child was raised partly by Delon’s mother and stepfather, and sued unsuccessfully to be recognized by the actor. He died in Paris in 2023.
In 1968, Delon’s Yugoslav live-in employee, Stevan Markovic, was murdered, his remains found in a public dump in a western Parisian suburb. Though Delon was cleared of any involvement in the death, the drawn-out investigation revealed a darker side to Delon and his ties with a figure from the underworld.
In an interview with Paris Match published in 2005, he alarmed fans with talk of suicide due to the despair and loneliness he said he felt after the breakup a few years earlier with the mother of two of his children. “Deciding not to do it is the hard part,” he said. “To do it is child’s play.”
Foster Family
Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon was born on Nov. 8, 1935, in Sceaux, a town outside Paris. His parents divorced when he was a child, and he lived with a foster family before attending a Catholic boarding school. He dropped out of school at age 14 and returned to live with his mother and stepfather, a butcher who taught him his first trade.
Enlisting in the military at age 17, he was a paratrooper at Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam, during the 1954 military defeat that precipitated France’s withdrawal from Indochina. Delon was given a dishonorable discharge for disciplinary reasons and returned to Paris to work odd jobs including clerk and waiter.
He started hanging around the Left Bank and became friendly with actress Brigitte Auber, who brought him to the 1957 Cannes Film Festival, where he caught the eye of a talent scout for Hollywood producer David Selznick.
Meeting in Rome, Selznick offered Delon a seven-year contract, with the expectation that he would learn English. Back in Paris, Delon met with French director Yves Allegret, who persuaded him to start his career in his home country.
He made his debut that year playing an inexperienced hit man in Allegret’s Quand la femme s’en mêle (“Send a Woman When the Devil Fails”) and followed up in 1960 with his first major role in Rene Clement’s crime thriller Plein Soleil (“Purple Noon,” loosely based on Patricia Highsmiths’ The Talented Mr. Ripley), the film that made him a star.
‘Actor by Accident’
Dominating the French box office from the 1960s to the mid-1980s, he won the last of his three Cesars in 1985 and achieved a degree of fame in Japan. He never became a big star in the US, despite a stint in Hollywood, but he expressed few regrets.
“I’m the son of a butcher,” he told GQ in 2018. “Even if my father had been a director, I wouldn’t have found this career without literally falling into it. I’m an actor by accident.”
Delon collected art and kept a stable of race horses, including a trotter named Equileo, which held a world title. The actor also organized amateur boxing championships. He became a Swiss citizen in 1999 and lived near Geneva and in his country home in France’s Loiret.
Delon set up two production companies during his career and sponsored a line of accessories that included a men’s cologne called AD, champagne, cognac and watches.
One of France’s best-known ladies’ men, he separated from his last wife in 2002. “I suffer from that part of my being that is most vulnerable: my heart,” he said after the breakup, adding that he was looking for a woman, preferably a mature one. “Not a young one who has to be taught, “ he said. “I have no more desire to play Pygmalion.”
Delon had a son, Anthony, with wife Nathalie Barthelemy and two children with Dutch model Rosalie van Breemen, whom he met in 1987. They were together for almost 15 years.
In 2023, French police began in investigation into Delon’s companion, Hiromi Rollin, following a formal complaint by the three children that she was “demeaning and aggressive” and one by the actor himself for violence against a vulnerable person, the Associated Press reported. Rollin denied the charges.
--With assistance from Valentine Baldassari.
(Updates with Macron’s comment in third paragraph.)
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