French actor Alain Delon, best known for his roles in Jean-Pierre Melville's films, particularly “Samurai,” has died at the age of 88.
“He passed away peacefully at his home in Dushi, surrounded by his three children and family,” his family said in a statement to AFP.
In addition to “Samurai,” Dillon also appeared in Melville's two great heist films, “The Red Circle” and “On Fleck.”
Among his other important films are René Clément's Purple Afternoon, Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers and The Leopard, Antonioni's The Church, José Giovanni's Two Men in the City, and Joseph Losi's Mr. Klein.
After Jean-Paul Belmondo had defined French cool at the beginning of the New Wave in Godard's Breathless, Delon and director Melville redefined it with great awareness in The Samurai, in which he played a hitman who always adjusted his hat so that it was so, and as a result the actor was compared to James Dean.
But the comparison with Dean was limited; while the American actor tended toward emotionality in his performances, Dillon was far from emotional. What was considered brilliant in “Samurai” might seem cold in a lesser film, like Melville’s “On Fleck.”
Yet it is difficult for Americans to comprehend how popular Delon was during the 1960s and 1970s, not just in France but in places as diverse as Japan, Communist China (where the 1975 version of “Zorro,” starring Delon as the folk hero, was one of the first Western films shown in the country after the Cultural Revolution) and Latin America.
Delon’s extraordinary appeal was crystallised in The Samurai. Film scholar David Thomson has described him as “the mysterious angel of French cinema, only 32 in 1967, almost feminine. Yet serious and flawless enough to be deadly or powerful. He was also close to the real French underworld of the time.” Thomson adds: “Delon was not so much a good actor as he was a striking presence – no wonder he was so happy to realise that what Melville needed most was his willingness to be filmed.”
Roger Ebert called Delon “the handsome, tough-guy type of French cinema, an actor so impossibly handsome that his best strategy for dealing with his appearance was to use a deadpan face.”
In Samurai, Melville closely follows Dillon's killer Jeff Costello as he tries to find an alibi, takes out a nightclub owner, outwits a group of policemen, discovers that those who hired him have betrayed him, and is pursued by the police. The plot is far less important than the film's style, and Dillon's portrayal of the killer.
Delon's first major film was René Clément's 1960 Purple Afternoon, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, in which Delon played Tom Ripley, a psychopath who murders his friend and assumes his identity. The film made the actor a star. (The film was restored in 2012 and screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013 as part of a retrospective of his career.)
In Visconti's great opera Rocco and His Brothers, also produced in 1960, Delon played the title character, part of a poor family who moves north to Milan from southern Italy in search of better opportunities. His passive character reluctantly turns to boxing to support the family.
A few years later, Delon worked with Visconti again on the director's 1963 masterpiece The Leopard, in which Burt Lancaster played a 19th-century Sicilian prince trying to deal with the revolution and what it might mean for his family and social class. Delon played his handsome nephew, who joins the revolutionaries and then the king's army; he and the beautiful Claudia Cardinale had a clear chemistry in the film.
In 1962, Delon co-starred with Monica Vitti in Antonioni's L'Eclisse, the second film in the director's acclaimed trilogy about alienation. Delon was ideally cast as a stockbroker who becomes involved with Vitti's character but is unwilling and unable to meet her emotional needs.
In 1969 he starred in the erotic thriller “La Piscine” (The Swimming Pool) with Romy Schneider and Maurice Ronnet.
He co-starred with Richard Burton (who played the title character), Schneider and Valentina Cortese in Joseph Losi's 1972 film The Assassination of Trotsky, and a few years later worked with Losi on the great Monsieur Klein, in which Delon gave a masterful performance as a Catholic art dealer in occupied Paris who exploits wealthy Jewish art collections—but begins to have problems of his own when people mistake him for a devious Jew using his name for covert operations. Delon served as a producer on the film.
Delon starred in three films with a French star of an earlier generation, Jean Gabin: the crime dramas Any Number Can Win (1963), The Sicilian Clan (1969), and Two Men in the City (1973), the latter also starring a young Gérard Depardieu in a small role, thus serving as a bridge between three generations.
Dillon also had a supporting role as a photographer following Shirley MacLaine in the 1964 international production “The Yellow Rolls-Royce” starring Rex Harrison and Ingrid Bergman.
The actor was among a slew of French stars (and some American ones, including Kirk Douglas and Glenn Ford) who starred in René Clément's disturbing tale of the final days of the Nazi occupation of the French capital, “Is Paris Burning?” (1966).
In 1971, Delon co-starred in Terence Young's Red Sun with Charles Bronson, Toshiro Mifune, Ursula Andress and Capucine. The Spanish-set Western was not well received in the United States, but was a hit in Europe and Asia. (Delon, who had developed an interest in Japan as a result of Samurai, has long enjoyed a cult following in the country, where his eponymous sunglasses have been a hit.)
In 1973, Dillon reteamed with his “The Leopard” co-star Burt Lancaster in Michael Winner's thriller “Scorpio,” in which Dillon played a hitman who is ordered to eliminate Lancaster's tired spy who wants out of the game. (Oddly enough, Winner's previous film, “The Mechanic,” starring Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent, had a nearly identical plot.)
Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon was born in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine. His father was of French and Italian Corsican descent, and his mother was of French and German descent. His parents separated early, and Delon's stormy childhood included repeated expulsions from school. After military service in French Indochina, he worked odd jobs in Paris, where he met the actor Jean-Claude Briali, who invited him to the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, where Delon made some professional connections.
The following year he made his film debut with a small role in Yves Allégret's “Send a Woman When the Devil Fails”.
While David O. Selznick was in Italy filming A Farewell to Arms, or perhaps in Cannes, he met Delon and offered him a Hollywood contract on the condition that the budding actor learn English. Delon rejected any such ideas, though he did star in three American films over the years: the 1964 crime drama Once a Thief with Ann-Margret and Van Heflin, the 1966 western Four for Texas with Dean Martin, and Airport '79: The Concorde, in which he played the pilot of a troubled airliner.
During the early 1980s, there was a period when Delon pursued a career behind the camera, beginning in 1981 with Pour la peau d'un flic, which he adapted from a Jean-Patrick Manchette novel, and directed and starred with Anne Parillot; this was followed the following year by Le choc, in which he and Robin Davis adapted a novel by Manchette and directed it together, though Delon was not credited, and which starred with Catherine Deneuve; and finally Le battant (1983), in which Delon was among those who adapted a novel by André Karoff, and which he directed with Davis (though Davis was not credited this time) and starred in. All of these films were in the genre with which the actor was most comfortable and with which he was most associated, the crime drama, but they were only adequate efforts.
He adapted several other novels into films during the 1980s and wrote a number of original screenplays.
Most importantly, Dillon was the producer of 30 of his films.
He starred in the French crime drama series Frank Riva in 2003 and 2004, and as Julius Caesar in the 2008 film Asterix at the Olympic Games.
At the height of his career, in 1969, the actor was involved in a scandal with criminal and political dimensions. Stefan Markovic, Delon's former bodyguard, and his wife Nathalie (who appeared with him in “Samurai”) were murdered—his body was found in the woods—and investigators found a letter written by Markovic linking Delon to a Corsican fighter named François Marcantoni, who was later linked to former French President Georges Pompidou. Delon was questioned by police about the murder, and it was unclear how far the scandal would spread; only Marcantoni was convicted.
Delon's love life has been the subject of much interest in the French media. He had a relationship with German actress Romy Schneider from 1959 to 1964, but maintained a romantic relationship with her long after that. She eventually died of a combination of painkillers and alcohol in 1982. At the César Awards in 2008, Delon took the stage to accept an award on her behalf on her 70th birthday and asked the audience to give her a standing ovation.
However, during his relationship with Schneider, he had an affair with Nico (of the Velvet Underground), with whom he had a son, Ari Poloni.
He married Natalie Barthélemy in 1964 and had a son, Anthony. The couple divorced in 1969.
Delon then entered into a 15-year relationship with French actress Mireille Darc, and then another relationship with Dutch model Rosalie van Breemen, with whom he had two children, but he separated from her in 2002.
He was awarded the Honorary Palme d'Or in 2019.
His family placed him under guardianship in 2024 after he suffered a stroke in 2019.
