We lost actor Alain Delon. He became a postwar international fame due to his stunning appearance, and he had a successful long career in commercial films in Europe.
Over the course of six decades, Delon starred in over 80 films, including timeless films like Le Samouraï and The Leopard. He was eighty-eight. One of Delon’s kids’ representative verified the demise.
The news agency Agence France-Presse received a message from his three children on Sunday stating that the actor had passed away quietly at his Douchy, France, home.
Delon had a turbulent upbringing despite being born in a privileged Parisian suburb. When he was four years old, his parents separated. He moved around a lot as a child, living with different families, attending boarding schools, and earning a reputation as a mischievous and small-time robber.
Delon joined the French navy at the age of 17, spending four years of his career in French Indochina.
Following his military duty, he took odd jobs as a waiter and a longshoreman. He also began dating Brigitte Auber, an actress who would later become his first film star.
Delon’s career as a cinematic star began to take off in the late 1950s. One of her early roles was as the lead in the s** comedy Faibles Femmes, which is Italian for “Women Are Weak.”
In a disdainful 1959 review of the picture, New York Times critic Bosley Crowther said, “This young man, whom some genius press agent has helpfully tagged ‘the French James Dean,’ has long silky hair, high cheekbones and a loose-jointed, soigne air. He smiles come-hitherly and generally is condescending to the lovelies, who flip for him. He rides a motorcycle and affects the hauteur of a ‘cat.’”
The next year, René Clément’s psychological thriller Plein Soleil, often known as Purple Noon, solidified Delon’s reputation as a cat-like global s** symbol.
The Talented Mr. Ripley, written by Patricia Highsmith in 1955, had its first cinematic adaptation.
As Delon, who plays Ripley, strolls through a beachside market wearing a flawless white linen shirt, Clement’s camera swoons over him. His performance even won over Patricia Highsmith, the notoriously grumpy woman.
“This Ripley doesn’t promise happiness,” reviewer Anthony Lane stated in the essay “Can A Film Star Be Too Good-Looking?” published in the New Yorker in 2024.
For Delon, it is a cinematic mash note. “Here is someone, evidently, from whom we ought to steer clear, yet we can’t get away from him. We can’t even look away.”
Delon became one of the highest-paid French actors of his time because to Purple Noon.
In 1973, he began his own production businesses and ventured into singing, working with singer Dalida, who also happened to be his romantic interest, on at least one popular song, “Paroles, paroles.”
Delon attempted, but was unsuccessful, to establish a Hollywood career. Nevertheless, he starred alongside German actor Romy Schneider in European films, as well as Jane Fonda, Burt Lancaster, Charles Bronson, Yves Montand, and Brigitte Bardot.
Their well reported split in 1964 was just one of the numerous scandals that would taint his life away from the screen.
Those were his bodyguard’s 1968 strange death, s**y rumors of private parties, an unreported child with singer and model Nico, accusations of abuse from his other children, and his ventures into far-right politics, which many of his fellow filmmakers found unsettling.
Delon had a close acquaintance with Jean-Marie Le Pen, the head of the National Front, despite Le Pen’s overtly antisemitic and racist views.
Over the years, Delon won a César Award for Best Actor as well as an honorary Palme d’Or. Even though his most well-known roles were as attractive, immoral criminals, Delon shown versatility and creative ambition in his acting, particularly as he grew older.
In the 1976 motion picture Mr. Klein, which he also produced, Delon played a conceited gentile trader who, during World War II, was mistaken for Jewish and turned over to the Nazis by the Vichy regime. Additionally, he appeared in a supporting part as a depressed gay nobleman who assists Jeremy Irons’ lead character in finding love in 1984’s Un Amour de Swann, which was based on a novel by Marcel Proust.
Delon’s influence on culture was enormous and unique. The Queen Is Dead album cover by The Smiths included a still from L’Insoumis (The Unvanquished) with the actor’s melancholic expression, while Madonna’s song “Beautiful Killer” pays tribute to him. Reservoir Dogs, the director Quentin Tarantino’s breakthrough picture, was influenced by actor Alfonso Delon.
He told an interviewer, “I could see Alain Delon in a black suit saying, ‘I’m Mr. Blonde,’” according to New York magazine.
Delon was made an Officer after being made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 1991.
His final screen credit was for his role as himself in the 2019 French film Toute Ressemblance. He spent a large portion of his later career in theater and television.
Following a stroke that year, his children got into a protracted, high-profile argument about who would take care of him.
A French judge put Delon under formal guardianship at the beginning of 2024.