Alain Delon (1935 - 2024) was a French actor, producer and occasional director, one of the most prominent figures in European cinema from the 1960s onward. [1] He worked with Luchino Visconti, René Clément, Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Pierre Melville, and his performances as elegant, emotionally sealed criminals became a lasting reference point for the French crime film. [2] He received an honorary Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2019.
Early life
Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon was born on 8 November 1935 in Sceaux, on the southern edge of Paris. [1] His parents separated when he was a small child and he was placed with foster carers and later in a succession of boarding schools from which he was repeatedly expelled. At seventeen he enlisted in the French Navy and served during the First Indochina War, returning to France to work in a variety of casual jobs.
A visit to the Cannes Film Festival in 1957 with friends from the acting world brought him to the attention of producers, and he made his screen debut the same year. [3]
Breakthrough
Delon's international reputation was established in 1960 by two films. In René Clément's Plein soleil, released in English as Purple Noon, he played Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley as a beautiful and wholly amoral impostor. In Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers he took the title role in a study of southern Italian migrants in Milan, beginning a long association with the director. [2] Visconti cast him again in The Leopard in 1963, opposite Burt Lancaster, and he appeared for Antonioni in L'Eclisse in 1962.
The Melville films and stardom
The collaboration that fixed Delon's screen image was with Jean-Pierre Melville. In Le Samouraï in 1967 he played Jef Costello, a contract killer whose ritualised precision and near-total silence turned the character into an icon of minimalist screen acting; Le Cercle rouge and Un flic followed. [1] Around these he built a career of considerable commercial power in thrillers and policiers, including La Piscine and Borsalino, the latter co-starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and produced by Delon's own company.
He produced a number of his own projects, among them Joseph Losey's Monsieur Klein in 1976, in which he played a Parisian art dealer profiting from Jewish clients under the Occupation who is mistaken for a Jew himself — widely regarded as one of his finest performances. He directed two films in the early 1980s and won the César Award for Best Actor in 1985 for Bertrand Blier's Notre histoire. [2] He also recorded songs, most famously the spoken-word duet "Paroles, paroles" with Dalida.
Later years
Delon worked less frequently from the 1990s, appearing occasionally in French films and on television and returning to Godard's Nouvelle Vague in 1990. He held Swiss as well as French citizenship and lived for long periods at Douchy-Montcorbon in the Loiret, where he assembled a substantial art collection. [1] He received an honorary Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1995 and an honorary Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2019, the latter accompanied by public debate over remarks he had made during his career. [3] He suffered a stroke in 2019 and died at Douchy-Montcorbon on 18 August 2024.
Legacy
Delon's death was marked in France as the passing of the last of the great postwar screen stars, and the government held a national tribute in his honour. [1] His performances for Melville in particular have exercised a durable influence on crime cinema, acknowledged by directors including John Woo, Michael Mann and Jim Jarmusch, and Le Samouraï is regularly cited among the most influential French films of its decade. [2]
