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, 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 impenetrable realism of Delon’s darkness was the element about him 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 able to play well beyond the simple hero and give nuance and reality to a villain. 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 the 1960s. Delon was an anti-hero from birth, the actor born into 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 “removing problems” even during the Sixties’ brief flash of optimism before the proxy war in Vietnam and Leonid Brezhnev closed in. In a classic Delon film — Le Samouraï (The Samurai) or Le Piscene (The Swimming Pool) — there was no 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 wherewithal to put his staggeringly chiseled features to good use in that work. Renowned for his almost total lack of actorly tics and histrionics, what swiftly became the Delon trademark was instead the stripped-down, coiled quietness he exuded — the rakishly peaked eyebrows over the trademark ocean-blue eyes and the cut of the impenetrable doubt etched in his face bore him the menace of a leopard about to strike. Fight or flight was the only sensible question.

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. Pictured below off-camera but on-set, Delon receives help from a young Jane Fonda celebrating his 28th birthday, celebrated on the set of René Clément’s 1963 Les Félins (Joy House), in which Delon plays a Cote d’Azur card shark who, after a series of gangland murders in his immediate vicinity, is ultimately trapped by the rich-American-girl played by Fonda.

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

Decades later, Faithfull went out of her way to deny that there had been a dalliance with Delon, but despite that, the scene in which he unzips her nicely fitted black leather riding gear kept the suspicion mill churning hot. Arguably, Mick had his nose a bit out of joint, 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. Certainly, as we now know with his eight children (and counting), Jagger did a bit of that himself.

Delon had a modest three children by three different women, and possibly a fourth by former Velvet Underground/Warhol Girl Nico, 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.

In his later years, of course, it was just about enjoying himself. Below, a shot of Delon enjoying a 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” had been installed on the Place de la Concorde.