Alain Delon, 88, Lion Of French Film, Dies At His Loire Valley Estate

The list of directors with whom France’s beloved and stubbornly private Alain Delon worked with reads as a history of cinema in mid-century postwar Europe: Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Michelangelo Antonioni, René Clément, Luchino Visconti, Jacques Deray. Delon’s piercing hitman’s stare, a necessary tool for survival as a pretty-boy in the mileu of real-life gangsters and prostitutes out of which he was more or less hauled onto the screen in the Fifties, got him his early work playing mobsters, thieves and, most unsurprisingly, hitmen, as well as their world-weary opposite numbers, cops. Below, Delon as director Joseph Losey’s super-cool lover-boy/assassin in The Assassination of Trotsky, opposite a longtime real-life love of his, German actress Romy Schneider, who played Trotsky’s secretary.

The point is that his global success as a bad-boy leading man wasn’t an accident. The impenetrable realism Delon brought to buttress his darkness was the element that so entranced his legions of directors: In the young Delon they found a true European leading-man equivalent to combat Hollywood’s early Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, but one who was intellectually able to play well beyond the simple hero and give nuance and human reality to a superb array of variously conflicted villains. Because he had grown up among them. McQueen, Newman and Co. would come to their cinematic anti-heroics later, as America’s directors and screenwriters experienced and reacted to the 1960s. Delon was an anti-hero from birth, the actor and the man who came of age in Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Samuel Beckett’s postwar nihilism.

Mobster, hitman, cop — in Delon’s hands, they were equivalents, the mechanics of postwar Europe, put there to do the necessary and occasionally deadly work of “problem removal,” even during the Sixties’ brief flash of optimism as the proxy war in Vietnam and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev shut the eastern half of Europe in. In a classic Delon film — such as Le Samouraï (The Samurai) or Le Piscene (The Swimming Pool) — there was never a dark “side” because the entire cosmos was dark. Delon was at exquisitely at home within that theatre of operations, pictured below lounging in Rome-Fiumcino’s arrivals hall before his next job in Henri Verneuil’s The Sicilian Clan.

He had the presence and the intellectual agility to put his staggeringly well-chiseled features to good use in the work. Renowned for his almost total lack of actorly tics and histrionics, what swiftly became the Delon trademark was instead his stripped-down, coiled quietness — the rakishly peaked eyebrows over the trademark ocean-blue eyes and the cut of impenetrable doubt of everything and everybody etched in his face. It bore him the menace of a leopard about to strike as well as the vertiginous vulnerability of the leopard as an apex predator. In any of Delon’s characters’ challenged lives, the only sensible question was the basic, bloody, fundamental question found in Nature’s own food chain: fight or flight. In his films, he executed both those tactics with brilliant coldness.

Off-camera, he brightened considerably around women, attracting legions, wooing many, loving few, marrying just one, Nathalie Delon, nee Francine Canovas, his leading lady in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï, (The Samurai). Pictured below in Monte Carlo in 1965, she bore him the first of his three children, his son Anthony.

There were, of course, many leading ladies; Delon is unthinkable without them. Pictured below off-camera but on-set, Delon receives heartfelt best wishes from from a delighted Jane Fonda celebrating Delon’s 28th birthday during the filming of René Clément’s 1963 Les Félins (Joy House). In the film, Delon plays a Cote d’Azur card shark who, after a series of gangland murders among his immediate acquaintance, is ultimately trapped by the rich-American-girl played by Fonda. The plot is that of a delightfully twisty girl-gets-boy caper: To escape the gangsters gunning for him, Delon’s character winds up jailed, more or less cushily, in the gilt cage of Fonda’s character’s Cote d’ Azur villa.

Put another way, from the looks of the sparks flying at the birthday party, the on-screen chemistry had solid backup in real life.

Among the fashionable mid-career films was Jack Cardiff’s 1972 The Girl On A Motorcycle, notable for its cool filmmaking then, notable now for one particularly steamy love scene starring Delon opposite a fetching Marianne Faithfull. Pictured below at an early restaurant meet with the director in 1967, the film’s leading lady brought along her boyfriend at the time, Mick Jagger, pictured below, right, who seems uncharacteristically and hilariously at a loss in the glow of the glowering, massively assured wattage emanating from the bloke just to Ms. Faithfull’s right on the banquette.

Decades later, Faithfull went out of her way to deny that there had been a dalliance with Delon during the filmmaking, but despite that, the scene in which he unzips her nicely fitted black leather bike jacket has succeeded in keeping the suspicion mill churning hot. Arguably, Mick had gotten his nose a bit out of joint at some juncture, so perhaps Ms. Faithfull, a scion of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha German royal house, felt moved to keep the historical 1960s-1970s bed-hopping records straight. It will remain a distinct irony that Faithfull couldn’t see that — whether she actually bedded Delon or not — to let the high suspicion of an on-set dalliance with the otherworldly, gangsterish Delon linger, while cuckolding Jagger (a rare-enough thing in itself), would only have added to her Sixties’ player profile.

Compared to Jagger, with his eight children to date, Delon fathered a modest three by three different women, and possibly a fourth by former Velvet Underground/Warhol Girl Nico, a son whom Delon never recognized as his own. In addition to his eldest Anthony, pictured below in 1988 on a television stage with his father, he had Alain Fabien and Annouchka Delon, both of whom, with Anthony, were their father’s side as he died at his estate in Douchy, the Val de Loire village where he had lived for the last half-century.

In 2019, Delon received the Cannes Film Festival’s lifetime achievement award. Below, Annouchka Delon with her father at a festival dinner. It was to be his last, and arguably most fitting, public appearance.

In his later years, of course, it was just about enjoying himself. Below, a shot of Delon reveling in an old-lions-still-going-strong aperitif in November 2017 with Jean-Paul Belmondo, center, and French businessman and circus magnate Marcel Campion, left, whose giant Ferris wheel, “La Roue de Paris” was at the time installed on the Place de la Concorde.

As his death was announced to France and the world on Sunday, 18 August, by his children, France’s president Emmanuel Macron tweeted an elegant valedictory in very short order.

“Alain Delon has played legendary roles and made the world dream. Lending his unforgettable face to shake up our lives,” the French president wrote. And then came the president’s extraordinarily honest kicker: “Melancholic, popular, secretive, he was more than a star: he was a French monument.”