Iconic French Actor Was 88

French acting star Alain Delon, whose many iconic roles included Le Samouraï, Plein Soleil and The Leopard, has died in France at the age of 88.

The actor’s children said in a statement that their father had passed away in the early hours of Sunday, surrounded by his family and beloved Belgian Shepherd Loubo, in his long-time chateau home in the village of Douchy, in the Le Loiret region some 100 miles south of Paris.

Delon’s death marks the passing of one of the last surviving icons of the French cinema scene of the 1960s and 70s, when the country was on an economic roll as it reconstructed in the wake of World War Two.

The star, who was at the peak of this career from the 1960s to the 1980s, fell into acting by chance.

Born on November 8, 1935, in the Paris suburb of Sceaux, he had a turbulent childhood after his parents divorced when he was still young.

After training briefly as a butcher in his step-father’s business, he entered military school at the age of 17. After being caught stealing equipment, he was given the choice of expulsion or signing up for a tour of duty in Southeast Asia (then Indochina).

Delon fought in the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 but wound up in trouble again after he crashed a jeep he had stolen and returned to France in 1956.

Having moved to Paris, where he did odd jobs to make ends meet, Delon got his first introduction to the cinema world through his relationship with actress Brigitte Auber, who had recently appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief.

After they hooked up, she took him to the Cannes Film Festival in 1957, where he met the actor and director Jean-Claude Brialy as well as his future agent George Beaume.

“I came down with a girl that I liked, who loved me… I took it all in, did the red carpet but even then, I felt at home… not least and I say this without pretension because it was made clear to me that I was not bad looking.“  he told a Cannes masterclass in 2019.

His next big break came via the actress Michèle Cordoue, with whom he had an affair. She convinced her husband, director Yves Allégret, to give him a small role in his film Quand la femme s’en mêle.

Delon was candid about the role women had played in his early career.

“If I hadn’t met the women I met, I would have died long ago. It’s the women – I don’t know why – who loved me, who got me into this profession, who wanted me to do it, and who fought for me to do it,” he told a masterclass at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019.

His career took off quickly from there, with Delon then appearing in Marc Allégret’s Sois belle et tais-toi, which also featured Jean-Paul Belmondo in the cast, followed by Pierre Gaspard-Huit’s Christine, which would see Delon appear opposite Romy Schneider.

It would mark the beginning of one the most celebrated cinema love stories of the time. Schneider was already famous on the back of her Sissi roles, while 23-year-old Delon was still an unknown.

The relationship lasted just five years, but they remained close, famously reuniting on the big screen in Jacques Deray’s The Swimming Pool in 1969.

Other high-profile partners across Delon’s packed, often torrid love life included German actress, singer and model Nico, the singer Dalida, and the actress Mireille Darc, who was his partner for 15 years after they met on the set of Jean Herman’s 1969 gangster drama Jeff.

Delon’s star began to rise with René Clément’s 1960 crime thriller Plein Soleil, for his performance as the deadly Tom Ripley. The same year, he also starred in Luchino Visconti’s Milan-set melodrama Rocco and His Brothers.

Other highlights of his early career include Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1962 romantic drama The Eclipse, in which he starred opposite Monica Vitti.

Delon would reunite with Visconti on The Leopard in 1963, co-starring alongside Claudia Cardinale and Burt Lancaster. His performance garnered him a nomination for most promising male newcomer in the 1964 Golden Globes.

The 1960s would also see Delon collaborate with Jean-Pierre Melville for the first time on the 1967 thriller Le Samouraï.

It would mark the beginning of an iconic director-actor partnership, which saw them also collaborate on The Red Circle (1970) and A Cop (1972), but was then cut short by the sudden death of Melville at the age of 55 from a heart attack in 1973.

The 1970s, would see the Delon appear in a raft of crime thrillers including Deray’s Borsalino, alongside Belmondo, Doucement les basses, Scorpio, Les granges brûlées, Blood on the Streets, Flic Story and Le Gitan.

Outside of this genre, other highlights of Delon’s career in this period included Joseph Losey’s award-winning Holocaust drama Mr. Klein, in which he played a Parisian art dealer in occupied France who is mistaken for a Jewish man.

The film world premiered in Competition at Cannes in 1976, and went on to win César awards for best director, film and production design in 1977.

Director and screenwriter Costa-Gavras, who co-wrote the screenplay, paid tribute to Delon.

“He was completely self-taught,” he said in an interview with radio network France Inter on Sunday. “He used his own meanders, and this resulted in an extraordinary truth. It was unique.”

“It’s a film which gave an extraordinary dimension to Alain Delon,” he said of the actor’s performance in Mr. Klein. “He wasn’t acting. He was it… Delon, the thug; noble Delon; Delon, prince of cinema; Delon, the extraordinary actor.”

Despite his prolific career spanning 107 acting credits, Delon won very few acting awards.

His only César award was for his performance in Bertrand Blier’s 1984 melodrama Notre Histoire as an alcoholic who becomes obsessed with a mysterious woman he meets on a train.

Later on in life, the actor was showered with honorary awards including Berlin’s Honorary Golden Bear in 1995 and Cannes Honorary Palme d’Or in 2019, as well as lifetime achievement awards from Marrakech and Locarno in 2003 and 2012 respectively.

Delon’s star began to wane in the 1980s, but there were a number of high profile roles nonetheless, notably in include Volker Schlöndorff’s 1984 Marcel Proust adaptation Swann In Love, for which he won praise for his performance as dandy aristocrat, the Baron de Charlus.

In an unlikely pairing, Delon also collaborated with Jean-Luc Godard on his 1990 film Nouvelle Vague, playing mysterious drifter Roger Lennox, who is picked up by wealthy industrialist Elena Torlato-Favrini.

Among Delon’s final credits are the TV movie Love Letters, co-starring opposite Anouk Aimée, and the 2008 comedy Astérix at the Olympic Games, in which he played Julius Caesar.

In recent years, Delon’s life had been dogged by ill health and a bitter, public family feud between his three children over his care.

The dispute between Delon’s oldest son Anthony, by French model Francine Canovas, and daughter and son Anouchka and Alain-Fabien, by Dutch model and TV presenter Rosalie van Breemen, hit the headlines last summer as the different parties went to the media with their version of events.

Obituaries and tributes to Delon dominated the French media on Sunday as France woke up to the news of the iconic actor’s death.

“You could say he was prepared… Alain Delon died so many times on screen that it must have seemed like a last take. God, who is a bad screenwriter, said, “Cut! ”,” wrote the Figaro.

“Delon did not get up. He will never again take the helm of the Plein Soleil, or drown as Maurice Ronet in The Swimming Pool, collapse before the eyes of Cathy Rosier in a nightclub run by Jean-Pierre Melville. He is today freed from the war waged by his children, Anthony, Alain-Fabien and Anouchka, who unpacked their quarrel in a dramatic media-judicial melodrama, unworthy of the star that was their father.”

French president Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to Delon in a post on X, saying: “Melancholy, popular, secret, he was more than a star: a French monument.”

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