It is May 20, 2019 and Alain Delon, the day after receiving, in tears, the Palme d’Or for Lifetime Achievement at Cannes, entrusts AFP with a letter of thanks to the public that sounds like a testament.
“I started by chance, I didn’t have the vocation like other actors of those years like Lino Ventura or Burt Lancaster or Jean Gabin. I had enlisted, I had returned from Indochina and I didn’t have a job yet. I was saved by a young actress I met in those years, Brigitte Auber. In ’57, without a film, I came with her for the first time to Cannes. When they asked me if I wanted to be an actor, I said I wasn’t capable, I hadn’t attended any school. But the director of my first film, ‘Godot’, Yves Allegret, gave me the rule that even the greats repeated to me and that I then followed throughout my career: don’t act, look, listen, be yourself. Don’t be an actor, live. From that moment on, I lived all my roles.” Alain Delon dries his eyes the whole time that evening of May 19, 2019 on the stage of the Cannes Film Festival where he receives the Palme d’Or for Lifetime Achievement, he cries for the thunderous applause coming from the room, for the people who come to mind while he speaks, all now gone. “I didn’t want this Palme d’Or, it doesn’t belong to me but to the directors who directed me, to Visconti, to Rene Clement, to Melville, to Jacques Deray”.
“They are no longer here and I accept it for them” the actor awarded for his career had said again. Brigitte is the first of the women that Delon names, he also mentions Romy Schneider, Monica Vitti, he gets emotional talking about Annie Girardot. Many loves but not only, Alain Delon even before being an actor has to deal with his charm that is a fundamental part of his popularity and his career: “I owe everything to women, I made this career for them”, he admits. In the theater a clip of Plein Soleil (Plein Soleil), the thriller in which he plays Mr. Ripley, relaunches the images of the irresistible charm of the young Delon. The lights come back on, he interrupts the ritual of the meeting to stand up and say to the audience: “And now how can you look at me as I am now?”.
Delon tells how Visconti, after having seen that film, summoned him to London, at the suggestion of his agent at the time Olga who insisted on proposing her then unknown client, and that he had met him while he was preparing Don Carlo at Covent Garden. The meeting was a happy one and the Italian director chose him for Rocco and His Brothers, the first film with which Delon began an international and auteur career. The actor cries, “I can’t stop, sorry” he says quoting Girardot. Romy Schneider, the great love of his youth with whom he formed the most beautiful couple in cinema at the turn of the 60s, remains a taboo for him, just a reference to when he imposed her for The Swimming Pool (“he was in a moment of crisis, I said either you take her or the film won’t be made”), better not to talk about it, better to remember something else. Like “my dog who always followed me on the set of The Leopard” and in fact he is in Visconti’s film, like “the nouvelle vague that had banned me, but I went ahead anyway”, like the American experience “beautiful but I missed France too much”. On that occasion in Cannes he had been greeted by feminist protests against an actor who had admitted to having had violent attitudes towards women, notoriously close to the right. Protests that the festival delegate Thierry Fremaux had rejected with a joke: “we give him an honorary Palme d’Or not a Nobel Peace Prize. Delon, you have to understand, is a man from another era, another generation”.