French acting star Alain Delon, whose numerous iconic roles include The Samourai, Plein Soleil And The Leoparddied in France at the age of 88.
The actor’s children said in a press release to AFP that their father died on Sunday at his long-time castle estate in the village of Douchy.
With his death, one of the last living icons of the French cinema scene of the 1960s and 1970s has passed away, when the country was riding a wave of success during the reconstruction after the Second World War.
The star, who was at the peak of his career in the 1960s to 1980s, came to acting by chance.
Born on November 8, 1935 in the Paris suburb of Sceaux, he had a difficult childhood after his parents divorced when he was young.
At the age of 17, he entered military school. After being caught stealing equipment, he was given the choice of being expelled from school or volunteering for service in Southeast Asia (then Indochina).
Delon fought in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, but got into trouble again when he crashed a stolen jeep and returned to France in 1956.
After moving to Paris, where he took odd jobs to make ends meet, Delon got his first introduction to the world of cinema through his relationship with actress Brigitte Auber, who had recently starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s To catch a thief.
After they got together, she took him to the Cannes Film Festival in 1957, where he met actor and director Jean-Claude Brialy and his future agent George Beaume.
“I met a girl I liked and who loved me… I took it all in, walked the red carpet, but even then I felt at home… not least, and I say this without presumption, because it was made clear to me that I didn’t look bad,” he said at a master class in Cannes in 2019.
His next big break came with actress Michèle Cordoue, with whom he had an affair. She convinced her husband, director Yves Allégret, to give him a small role in his film. When the woman argues.
Delon always spoke openly about the role women played at the beginning of his career.
“If I hadn’t met the women I met, I would have died a long time ago. They are the women – I don’t know why – who loved me, who brought me to this profession, who wanted me to do it and who fought for me to do it,” he also said in the master class in Cannes.
From then on, his career took off, and Delon then appeared in Marc Allégret’s Sois belle et tais-toiin which Jean-Paul Belmondo also participated, followed by Pierre Gaspard-Huits Christinein which Delon would be seen alongside Romy Schneider.
It was the beginning of one of the most famous love stories in cinema. Schneider was already famous on the back of her Sissi roles, while 23-year-old Delon was still an unknown at the time.
The relationship only lasted five years, but they remained close and met on the big screen in Jacques Deray’s The swimming pool in 1969.
Meanwhile, Delon achieved star status with René Clément’s 1960 crime thriller Plein Soleilfor his portrayal of the deadly Tom Ripley.
In the same year he also played the leading role in Luchino Visconti’s Milan-set melodrama Rocco and his brothers. Delon would reunite with Visconti on The Leopard in 1963, alongside Claudia Cardinale and Burt Lancaster.
During his career, Delon has played more than 107 roles as an actor, including other highlights such as Jean-Pierre Melville’s hit thriller The Cruel Hero (1967), Borsalino (1970), The Red Circle (1970) and Joseph Losey’s Mr Klein (1976).
