Obituaries: Alain Delon, influential French actor who came to define the concept of cool
Often described as the most beautiful man in the world, Alain Delon was one of the biggest stars of a golden age of French cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. But his impact and influence stretched beyond such Gallic classics as Le Samurai and Plein Soleil, whose audience in Britain was restricted largely to arthouse cinemas.
He helped define the concept of cool with his style and demeanour, playing characters who should on paper have been out-and-out villains, including the assassin in the existential noir masterpiece Le Samurai and the cold-hearted killer in Plein Soleil, the first film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley.
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Hide AdUp until then killers were the baddies, pure and simple, but Delon confounded expectations with a cinematic presence that seduced and captivated audiences and viewers share his angst in Le Samurai.


Delon’s glamorous off-screen image was enhanced by reports of a string of romantic relationships with beautiful actresses, singers and models, including Nico and Romy Schneider. He and Schneider became the darlings of paparazzi. The relationship lasted several years from the late 1950s into the mid-1960s and was often tempestuous, but she was seemingly the woman against whom all subsequent lovers were measured.
But his looks and his star faded and he was dogged by scandal, his right-wing political views and his friendship with a notorious Corsican gangster. In more recent times he made headlines with his declining mental health and bitter disputes with and between his children. Earlier this year a court appointed an official to look after his affairs.
Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon was born in the Parisian suburb of Sceaux in 1935. His parents divorced a few years later and he was brought up by foster parents until they were killed in a road accident. He subsequently returned to live with his mother and her new husband, who was a butcher.
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Hide AdDelon was expelled from several schools, began work as an apprentice butcher, joined the French navy, trained as a marine and took part in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in what was Indochina. His military career was also dogged by indiscipline and he spent his 20th birthday in custody for stealing a jeep.
He left the navy in 1956 and had a variety of casual jobs while harbouring dreams of becoming the French James Dean, whose image was crystallised in the title of the film Rebel Without a Cause.
Delon developed a wide circle of friends from Francois Marcantoni, a Corsican gangter, to Brigitte Auber, an actress who became his lover and encouraged his ambitions to enter into her profession by paying for acting lessons.
In 1957 he headed for the Cannes Film Festival where his strikingly good looks excited attention from producers. Just one year later, after a few minor roles he was cast as the male lead in Christine, a period romance, opposite the German actress Romy Schneider, who was already a major star.
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Hide AdInitially they disliked each other, but by the end of the shoot they were engaged. Like so many of Delon’s relationships, the relationship was a stormy one and they never married.
Delon played a boxer from an impoverished background in southern Italy in Luchino Visconti’s drama Rocco and His Brothers, he consolidated his reputation with Plein Soleil (aka Purple Noon) and he was even considered for the title role in Lawrence of Arabia before director David Lean plumped for Peter O’Toole.
He co-starred with Burt Lancaster in Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), an epic historical drama set against the turmoil of Italian unification in the 19th Century. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was one of the highest-grossing movies in France in 1963. It exists in several versions, with the original (and best) running at well over three hours.
But Delon probaly made his greatest impact a few years later in Le Samurai, playing a seemingly amoral, apathetic character who seems to tune into the same existential wavelength as the protagonist in Albert Camus’s masterpiece L’Etranger (The Outsider).
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Hide AdWriter-director Jean-Paul Melville wrote the film with Delon in mind. He recalled their meeting and Delon’s reaction as Melville began to read the script: “Looked at his watch and stopped me: ‘You've been reading the script for seven and a half minutes and there hasn’t been a word of dialogue … That’s good enough for me.”
Another distinguished director Bertrand Blier said: “There has only been one film made like this in France. And it’s so much like Delon, this film – a mute, completely narcissistic role, where practically nothing happens. Delon sits in front of a mirror for an hour correcting the position of his hat.” And therein lies the character and an attitude that was to influence dozens of subsequent “cool hitman” movies.
In the late 1960s Delon was caught up in a real-life murder mystery after the corpse of his bodyguard was found in a public dump. A note subsequently emerged written by the bodyguard saying: “If I get killed, it’s 100 per cent the fault of Alain Delon and his godfather Francois Marcantoni.”
There was a suggestion that the bodyguard had been blackmailing Delon and Marcantoni had him killed. Delon and his then-wife actress Natalie Delon, with whom he co-starred in Le Samurai, were interviewed by police. Marcantoni was charged as an accessory to murder, but subsequently released and no one was ever convicted.
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Hide AdDelon did work with some fine directors in subsequent years and reached an unusually wide international audience as the pilot in The Concorde… Airport ’79, a box-office hit though it was never going to trouble the judges at Cannes. He did receive an honorary Palme d’Or at the 2019 festival, which was controversial because of his right-wing political views and alleged misogynistic comments over the years.
He had a son by Natalie Delon, though the marriage ended in divorce. In 1987 he married Rosalie van Breemen, a singer and former Miss Holland, with whom he had two more children. They divorced in the early 2000s. A son by Nico predeceased him. Latterly Delon lived mainly in Switzerland and took Swiss nationality.
There seemed to be endless family disputes and controversies that continued even after his death. Hiromi Rollin, who had been his live-in companion in later life, claimed that his children denied her a final farewell. And Delon’s final wish that his ten-year-old Belgian Malinois dog should be put down and buried with him caused uproar and the children refused to agree to it.
Obituaries
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