PARIS — Alain Delon, the internationally acclaimed French actor who played each villains and cops and stole hearts around the globe, has died on the age of 88, French media reported.
With his attractive looks and mild manner, the prolific actor managed to mix toughness with an appealing, vulnerable side, making him one among France's most unforgettable leading men.
Delon was also a producer. He also appeared in plays and, in later years, in television movies.
French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to “a French monument” on X.
“Alain Delon played legendary roles and made the world dream,” he wrote. “Melancholic, popular, mysterious, he was more than a star.”
Delon's children announced the artist's death on Sunday in an announcement to French news agency Agence France-Presse, a standard practice in France. Tributes to Delon immediately poured in on social media, and all of France's leading media outlets covered his successful profession extensively.
Earlier this yr, his son Anthony said his father had been diagnosed with B-cell lymphoma, a sort of cancer.
Last yr, Delon's fragile health was at the guts of a family dispute over his care, which led to bitter arguments between his three children reported within the media.
At the peak of his profession within the Sixties and Seventies, Delon was the goal of among the world's best directors, from Luchino Visconti to Joseph Losey.
In his later years, Delon became disillusioned with the film industry, saying that cash destroyed his dream.
“Money, commerce and television have destroyed the dream machine,” he wrote in a 2003 issue of the weekly newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur. “My cinema is dead. And so am I.”
However, he continued to work regularly and appeared in several television movies well into his seventies.
Delon's presence was unforgettable whether he was playing morally corrupt heroes or romantic leads. He rose to fame in 1960 with Plein Soleil, directed by Réne Clément, during which he played a murderer who tries to assume the identities of his victims.
He made several Italian movies, most notably with Visconti within the 1961 film Rocco and His Brothers, during which Delon plays a self-sacrificing brother who tries to assist his sibling. The film won the Special Jury Prize on the Venice Film Festival.
The Visconti film Le Guepard (The Leopard), starring Delon, won the Palme d'Or, the best award on the Cannes Film Festival, in 1963. His other movies included Clément's Is Paris Burning?, with a screenplay by Gore Vidal and Francis Ford Coppola, Jacques Deray's La Piscine (The Sinners) and, for a change, Losey's The Assassination of Trotsky in 1972.
In 1968, Delon began producing movies – 26 by 1990 – and maintained this rapid and assured dynamism throughout his life.
His confidence was evident in his statement to Femme in 1996: “I want to be loved the way I love myself!” This reflected his charismatic on-screen persona.
Delon continued to captivate audiences for years to return – and was criticized for comments he considered outdated. In 2010, he appeared in “Un mari de trop” (“One Husband Too Many”) and returned to the stage in 2011 with “An Ordinary Day”, together along with his daughter Anouchka.
He briefly headed the Miss France jury, but resigned in 2013 after disagreements arose over some controversial statements, including criticism of girls, LGBTQIA+ rights and migrants. Despite these controversies, he received a Palme d'Honneur on the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, a call that sparked further debate.
The Cannes Film Festival expressed its “sadness” on Sunday. Delon “embodied French cinema far beyond its borders,” it said in an announcement.
The Brigitte Bardot Foundation, which is committed to animal welfare, paid tribute to “an extraordinary man, an unforgettable artist and a great animal lover” in an announcement on social media. Delon was “a close friend” of French film legend Brigitte Bardot, “who is deeply saddened by his death,” the statement said. “We are losing a precious friend and a man with a big heart.”
French film producer Alain Terzian said Delon was “the last of the giants”.
“It's a new chapter in the history of French cinema,” he told France Inter radio. Terzian, who produced several movies directed by Delon, recalled: “Every time he appeared somewhere… there was a kind of almost mystical, quasi-religious respect. He was fascinating.”
Delon was born on November 8, 1935 in Sceaux, south of Paris. After his parents separated, he was placed with a foster family on the age of 4. He then attended a Roman Catholic boarding school.
At the age of 17, Delon joined the navy and was sent to Indochina. Back in France in 1956, he worked in various odd jobs, from waiter to transporter on the Paris meat market, before turning to acting.
In 1964, Delon had a son, Anthony, along with his then wife Nathalie Canovas, who played alongside him in Jean-Pierre Melville's “The Samurai” in 1967. He had two more children, Anouchka and Alain-Fabien, along with his later partner Rosalie van Breemen, with whom he produced a song and a video clip in 1987. Many also believed that he was the daddy of Ari Boulogne, the son of the German model and singer Nico, although he never publicly acknowledged paternity.
“I'm very good at three things: my job, stupid things and children,” he said in an interview with L'Express in 1995.
Delon was involved in many various activities throughout his life, from constructing a stable for harness racing horses to developing perfumes for men and girls, followed by watches, glasses and other accessories. He also collected paintings and sculptures.
In 1999, Delon announced the tip of his acting profession, but continued it and appeared in Bertrand Blier's “Les Acteurs” (The Actors) that very same yr. He later appeared in several police series on television.
“You will never see me old and ugly,” he said, already approaching 70, “because I will go before then or I will die.”
But it wasn't until 2019 that Delon summed up his feelings concerning the meaning of his life at a gala event in his honor on the Cannes Film Festival. “One thing I know for sure: if there is one thing I am truly proud of, it is my career.”
Retired AP correspondent Elaine Ganley contributed biographical material to this story.
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