French actor Alain Delon passed away in his home surrounded by family, leaving behind a storied career as one of cinema’s most beautiful actors.
Cinema lost French legend Alain Delon on August 18, 2024, as the ailing actor passed away peacefully in his sleep surrounded by members of his family in his home in Douchy, France. “Alain Fabien, Anouchka, Anthony, as well as (his dog) Loubo, are deeply saddened to announce the passing of their father,” the family said in a statement for the Agence France-Presse (AFP), as CBS News reports. Nowadays, Delon’s name remains a fixture in French media and pop culture, despite him having left the industry for years while grappling with health problems.
Unforgettable Looks
Cinephiles, fans, and even those who just happened upon photographs of a younger Delon in his busiest years, will attest that he warranted the title of one of cinema’s most beautiful men—perhaps one of its most beautiful people. Though he often took on roles that required a hardened, “tough guy” persona (from cops to criminals), there was something delicate, ethereal, and statuesque about his facial features (complete with startling blue eyes) that made for an interesting juxtaposition.
There are even entire articles that explore the sheer magnitude of Delon’s physical appearance, and how pivotal it was to his career (like Anthony Lane’s intriguing thinkpiece for The New Yorker, “Can A Film Star Be Too Good-Looking?”). Make no mistake: he was a talented actor who gained both national and international recognition, but it would be remiss to discuss his legacy without talk of his good looks—something that he was keenly aware of throughout his life.
“You’ll never see me old and ugly,” he said when he was already nearing 70, CBS News adds in its report, “because I’ll leave before, or I’ll die.”
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Road to Acting
Delon’s entry into acting was almost fortuitous, as the actor initially had no plans to enter the industry. Born in the Sceaux suburb of Paris on November 8, 1935, the actor had a tumultuous childhood in the wake of his parents’ divorce, as Melanie Goodfellow of Deadline details. After working as a butcher in his stepfather’s shop, he later entered the military at the age of 17. He found himself in Indochina (now Southeast Asia), and even fought in the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. His stint as a soldier would come to an end after authorities caught him crashing a jeep he had stolen, and he returned to France in 1956.
He would proceed to work odd jobs until a chance encounter with rising actress Brigitte Auber—who at the time had just finished filming Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief—would change the trajectory of his life. He entered a romantic relationship with her, and she brought him to the Cannes Film Festival in 1957 to introduce him to actor-director Jean-Claude Brialy and his future agent, George Beaume. Later on, an affair with actress Michèle Cordoue would lead him to star in the film Quand la femme s’en mêle by her husband, director Yves Allégret.
Famous Relationships
Delon was well aware of the effect he had on women, and acknowledged how much it has changed his life. “If I hadn’t met the women I met, I would have died long ago. It’s the women — I don’t know why — who loved me, who got me into this profession, who wanted me to do it, and who fought for me to do it,” he said in the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, Goodfellow adds.
Indeed, a number of affairs with women would mark much of Delon’s personal life. Many of whom are film behemoths themselves, including Brigitte Bardot, Romy Schneider, Ann-Margret, and Mireille Darc, as Peter Debruge recounts in a Variety tribute to the actor.
Even today, Bardot leads the series of tributes to Delon, who continued to be a longtime friend. In a statement to AFP, the actress shares that his death has left “a huge void that nothing and no one will be able to fill,” and that he “represented the best of France’s ‘prestige cinema.’ An ambassador of elegance, talent, beauty.”
“I lose a friend, an alter ego, a partner,” she concludes in her statement.
The Face of French Cinema
Writers and film critics have written paragraphs that passionately detail the nuances of Delon’s performances. For the most part, many will remember him as a man whose face said a thousand words—with a stoicism that made him ideal for roles requiring a cool, collected demeanor that artfully masked more complicated emotions.
Media outlets and cinephiles cite Luchino Visconti’s 1960 film Rocco and His Brothers as his breakthrough work. It centers on Rocco, a man who moves to Milan to start a better life for his impoverished family, and ends up making sacrifices to help his brothers while finding fame in boxing. Visconti loved Delon’s performance so much that he asked the actor to star in another one of his films, The Leopard (1963), in which he plays the aristocrat Tancredi (a role that earned him a nomination in the 1964 Golden Globes).
His other memorable roles include the sociopath killer, Mr.Ripley, in Plein Soleil (Purple Noon), René Clément’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s thriller The Talented Mr Ripley. The crime movies of director Jean-Pierre Melville would also become Delon’s most seminal works, cementing him as the unforgettable leading man in the genre. These include Le Samouraï (1967) and The Red Circle (1970), both of which had Delon acting in antagonistic roles with a cold, enigmatic charm.
As Peter Bradshaw puts it in his piece for The Guardian: “He had an unlocatable charisma to go with his beauty, the dangerous apparent passivity and stillness of a predator, and it was this that got him cast in some of the most fascinating crime pictures of the era.”
Controversies Amid an Enduring Legacy
Delon went on to make 90 films throughout his career, winning a César award for his role in Bertrand Blier’s Notre Histoire (1984), Goodfellow of Deadline shares. He would also go on to receive an Honorary Golden Bear from the Berlin Film Festival in 1995 and Honorary Palme d’Or from the Cannes Film Festival in 2019. His acting career began to slow down in the 1980s, though he remained a significant figure in French cinema and still starred in critically-acclaimed films like Volker Schlöndorff’s 1984 piece Swann In Love (where he yet again plays an aristocrat).
Delon also stirred up some controversy in his later years for his more outdated opinions on women and misogynistic comments, as well as vocal support for the far-right politics of the Front National. This brings back the time-old question of whether one should separate the art from the artist, and if doing so is the same as condoning their actions. There is also the longstanding legal feud between his children in regard to caretaking, which complicated the family dynamic for years as they became the center of a media frenzy.
The French actor, much like his characters, remains a divisive, complicated, yet undeniably compelling figure in the world of cinema. As France’s president Emmanuel Macron writes in an X post on Delon’s passing (translated from French): “Melancholy, popular, secretive, he was more than a star: he was a French monument.”
Banner photo via Wikimedia Commons
