Tormented and controversial, ill for some time now and away from the spotlight, French actor Alain Delon, an icon of world cinema, died this morning at the age of 88 in his home in Douchy. His three children announced it. “Alain Fabien, Anouchka, Anthony, as well as his dog Loubo, are deeply saddened to announce the passing of their father. He died peacefully at his home in Douchy, surrounded by his three children and his family,” the statement read, adding that the family asks for privacy.
‘Evil angel’, ‘black sun of the seventh art’, there are countless epithets with which this artist who both fascinated and divided is remembered today. Delon was a true star of the golden age of French cinema, known for his tough guy persona on screen in cult films.
His beauty and his magnetism have fascinated the greatest directors, but this was not enough to calm his demons. Shadow and light, this is the duality that the actor has embodied throughout his life. A personality that has never sought to be loved and has shown his bitterness and his torment to the point of misanthropy.
Alain Delon has “a rather self-destructive personality and in search of his own identity,” said director Joseph Losey. “The best and the worst, both inaccessible and so close, cold and burning,” summed up Brigitte Bardot on the occasion of the artist’s eightieth birthday.
Born on November 8, 1935 in Sceaux (Hauts-de-Seine), Delon said he was unhappy as a child, torn between two families: his parents separated and each started a new life. Destined to become a butcher’s clerk, he left everything and joined the French Navy in Indochina at the age of 17. He was 20 when he returned to Paris. He traded on the edge of legality in Pigalle, but his insolent beauty opened the doors of cinema for him.
Far from the category of cerebral actors, Delon had the reputation of an instinctive genius. He boasted of never having worked on his technique and relied on his charisma, a unique blend of warm beauty and cold fragility. His evil angel beauty revolutionized cinema in the films of Clement, Melville, Antonioni and Visconti. A blue-eyed murderous thug in ‘Plein Sable’ (1960), a taciturn hitman in ‘Frank Costello Face of an Angel’ (1967), an alcoholic mechanic in ‘Our Story’ (1984), he was an actor who lived his characters.
He made his debut in 1957 in ‘Godot’ (Quand la Femme S’en Melè) by Yves Allègret and a year later he met Romy Schneider, already a star thanks to ‘Sissi.’ A relationship that lasted five years followed, passionate, stormy, glamorous and an indissoluble bond between these two actors with little predisposition for happiness. The French actor has had several sentimental relationships that have marked his life, such as the one with the actress Brigitte Auber, who launched him into the profession by introducing him to Allègret.
He directed numerous masterpieces and great popular successes: ‘Plein Spruce’ (Renè Clèment), ‘Rocco and His Brothers’, ‘The Leopard’ (Luchino Visconti), ‘L’Ecliss’ (Michelangelo Antonioni), ‘The Nameless’ (Jean-Pierre Melville), ‘Borsalinò (Jacques Deray). From their rivalry to rare collaborations, Delon’s career developed alongside that of another sacred monster, his friend Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Despite having starred in a hundred films, many of which have become legendary, he has won only one César (in 1985 for Bertrand Blier’s “Our Story”) and received a Palme d’Or for lifetime achievement at Cannes in 2019. A few weeks later, he had a stroke from which he recovered with difficulty because he also suffered from lymphoma.
While Delon was unanimously admired as an actor, he was often criticized as a man. Considered unpleasant and with an oversized ego (he had the habit of speaking about himself in the third person), nostalgic for the De Gaulle years, some criticized him for his closeness to his friend and far-right French leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen: in favor of the death penalty and against homosexuality, which he called “unnatural”. American feminists strongly protested during the homage paid to him by the Cannes Film Festival, calling Delon “racist, homophobic and misogynist”.
The actor had not acted for years. “The filmmakers I could have filmed with are dead,” he told Le Monde in 2018. But “before dying,” he wanted to “make a film directed by a woman.”