Alain Delon has said that his mother had to put a sign on the pram that read: “Look, but don’t touch”. The beautiful child grew up to become the most handsome male movie star of the post-war era.
A French James Dean who stumbled into the film world the back way after hanging out with some pals at the Cannes Film Festival. American demon producer David O Selznick’s talent scout spotted the young man on the Croisette and wanted to sign him to a contract in English films, but Delon cockily refused.
Alain Delon eliminated in the Patricia Highsmith film adaptation “Het sol”. Photo: TCD/TT
Almost the same coincidentally, the self-taught Delon soon had a hard-fought breakthrough as the very first Tom Ripley (the role was originally intended for Brigitte Bardot’s husband Jacques Charrier but she forced him to drop out) in the Mediterranean-colored “Hot Sun” in 1959. There, Delon plays a seductive and parasitic double nature – as beautiful as unscrupulous – a role that in an almost ghostly way came to define his life both professionally and privately.
Delon became a gift to the European sixties, which sought the ambivalent, the difficult to flirt with, the limitless and often the immoral. He turned silence into a fine art, became a master at expressing a lot with few words and preserving his mystery on the white screen. The French Nobel laureate François Mauriac wrote admiringly after seeing “The Flight” (“L’insoumis”) in which he played a foreign legionnaire fleeing the Algerian war that Delon “…never speaks as well as when he is silent”.
“Rocco and his brothers”. Photo: Entertainment Pictures/TT
After that to seemingly seamlessly made one would-be classic after another in Italy, Luchino Visconti’s neorealist family drama “Rocco and his brothers” as well as the wastefully rich “The Leopard” and then the hypermodern “Fever” by Antonioni, he found his home again in France. Together with Jean-Pierre Melville, he made, among other things, hard-boiled cool and quiet gangster dramas that went down in film history for their precision and exquisite sense of form. “Samurai killer”, “The red circle”, “The criminals”… all hold up to this day. Delon often spoke of his lived his roles, rather than playing them, which explains some of the magic of his filmography.
Image 1 of 3 Alain Delon and Monica Vitti in “Feber”. Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection Image 2 of 3 Alain Delon and Monica Vitti in “Feber”. Photo: PictureLux / The Hollywood Archive / Alamy Stock Photo Image 3 of 3 Alain Delon and Monica Vitti in “Feber”. Photo: Sergio Strizzi
While his career was rolling and Delon became the hottest name of his generation, a darkness grew around his persona. In the late sixties, he became embroiled in a spectacular crime spree, the so-called Marković affair, which developed into a political scandal and involved celebrities, sex, drugs and even murder. A friend and associate of Delon’s was found dead, wrapped in a rug. The film star was investigated for both murder and other crimes but was later acquitted.
Image 1 of 3 Alain Delon in “Samurai Killer”. Photo: Rights Managed Image 2 of 3 “Samurai killer” (1967). Photo: Rights Managed Image 3 of 3 “Samurai killer”” (1967). Photo: Rights Managed
Even more controversialand perhaps more troubling for the French film industry, especially during the radical left years, was that Delon began to cultivate friendships with the right-wing nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen and was happy to speak widely in racist, homophobic and misogynistic terms. Accusations of violence and abuse in private life also rained throughout his adult life. The beauty, and the beast, in one and the same person.
Alain Delon on his way to a dinner with President Macron in the Elysée Palace Photo: Thibault Camus
The tension between Delon’s stylish exterior, superbly innovative acting and a reactionary agenda came to characterize Delon’s very long and fruitful career which, after all, was never directly ideologically marked. In the seventies, he both produced and starred in Joseph Losey’s cult-declared “Mr Klein”, which revolves around an art dealer who is mistaken for a Jew and deported from Paris during the Nazi occupation.
Delon was extremely complex, but never unambiguous.
Facts.Alain Delon
Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon was born in 1935 in Sceaux, south of Paris. He had his breakthrough as Tom Ripley in the Patricia Highsmith film adaptation “Hot Sun” in 1959. Among his most famous films are “Rocco and his brothers” (1960), “Fever” (1962), “The Leopard” (1963), “Samurai killer” (1967) and “De kriminella” (1972).
He did his last film role in 2019 in the drama-comedy “Toute Ressemblance”.
Golden Globe winner (Best Newcomer) for “Fever” in 1964. Won a César for Best Actor in 1985 for the Bertrand Blier film “Notre histoire”. Received a criticized Palm of Honor at Cannes 2019.
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