After a long career that brought him legions of fans – and many detractors – French actor Alain Delon leaves behind a rich legacy in film, including some of the great classics of world cinema. A dark acting style, encapsulated in a look that earned him the nickname “angel-face”, characterised an enduring body of work – even though Delon’s reputation was sometimes marred by his often tumultuous private life. FRANCE 24 takes a look back at one of the giants of French cinema – from Delon’s dazzling rise to stardom to the disillusionment his persona provoked amongst some of the public.
Early masterpieces
Shortly after winning fame in his early film roles, Delon was courted by some of the greatest auteurs of European film, who would go on to cast him in some of the most revered works in the history of cinema.
In 1960, Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti cast him in Rocco and His Brothers – a profound social realist work about the travails of a family from rural southern Italy, as they try to make their way in the industrial north – which was crowned with a grand jury prize at the Venice Film Festival. Two years later, an even more renowned Italian director, Michelangelo Antonioni, directed Delon in Eclipse – winning yet another grand jury prize, this time at the Cannes Film Festival.
In 1963 Delon starred as the Prince of Salina’s beloved, charismatic nephew Tancredi in Visconti’s lavish adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s masterpiece The Leopard. This time, the film won the Palme d’Or.
The same year, Delon worked for the first time with actor Jean Gabin in Any Number Can Win, with the rising star and the established icon of the big screen playing a criminal duo planning the robbery of a casino in Cannes. Best known to Anglophone audiences for his portrayals of Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret, and boasting a long career stretching back into the pre-war era, Gabin provided something of a model to Delon.
Any Number Can Win not only garnered critical acclaim but also commercial success – selling 3.5 million tickets. However, when Delon tried to make it in the ultimate box office market – the US – his three Hollywood films met with commercial failures, despite the presences of luminaries such as Dean Martin. Uninspired by the projects that were subsequently proposed to him, the French star went back to Europe.
The cop, the gangster and the samurai
Back in France, Delon reconnected with some old acquaintances. In 1969, he and German-French actress Romy Schneider – who he was in a relationship with from 1959 to 1963 – played a couple enshrouded in sexual jealousy in The Swimming Pool. That year he also reunited with both Gabin and Henri Verneuil, the director of Any Number Can Win in French gangster flick The Sicilian Clan.
But it was the start of his collaboration with the titan of the nouvelle vague Jean-Pierre Melville that produced the most striking film of Delon’s career: neo-noir masterpiece The Samurai, in which his “angel-faced” look made a powerful contrast with the role of the solitary, methodical hitman. Delon and Melville went on to shoot two more films together, The Red Circle and A Cop – the last two movies the latter made; both exuding a distinctly brooding air.
At the same time, Delon started taking on production roles, eventually going on to produce forty films over the course of his career. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until 1981 that he took on the role of director, for the crime thriller For a Cop’s Hide. He directed another film, Le Battant, in 1983.
But despite indubitable professional success throughout, Delon found a cloud of suspicion hanging over him from 1968 onwards. That year his bodyguard Stevan Markovic was found dead in a dump. A letter by Markovic to his brother was subsequently found, saying “if I get killed, it’s 100 percent the fault of Delon and his godfather François Marcantoni” – the latter being a Corsican gangster. Although police long suspected their involvement in Markovic’s murder, Delon and his then wife Nathalie were never prosecuted.
Late career plaudits and controversies
By the end of the 1980s, Delon already had a thirty-year career behind him. But – for all the acclaim generated by that body of work – he starred in an increasing number of flops as he progressed into the late stage of his career.
During the 1990s he acted in several commercial films, such as Dancing Machine and The Return of Casanova. After several failures – crowned by Day and Night, directed by the French philosopher Bernard-Henry Lévy – Delon announced his retirement from cinema in 1997, although he continued to take on occasional roles.
Nevertheless, it was during this period that Delon was awarded with some of the most prestigious awards political and cultural institutions have to offer. In 1991, then French president François Mitterrand made him a chevalier of the Legion of Honour. Fourteen years later, Mitterrand’s successor Jacques Chirac elevated him to the rank of commander for his “contribution to the art of world cinema”.
It wasn’t just the French state that garlanded him with honours. In 1995, the Berlin Film Festival awarded him a Golden Bear for lifetime achievement. Then in 2019, the Cannes Film Festival gave him a Palme d’Honneur. But social mores changed a great deal in the period between these two awards. Cannes’ decision to honour him provoked uproar on the part of feminist organisations in particular, who criticised him for having publicly made “racist, misogynistic and homophobic” remarks.
Indeed, a large part of the public had already become alienated from Delon, whose alleged links to the criminal underworld, alleged friendship with former National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen and reactionary declarations about women and gays considerably affected his reputation.
In 2008, he appeared on the big screen for the last time, in the mass-market fantasy comedy Asterix at the Olympic Games. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this feature somewhat lacked the seething existential angst of The Samurai and lush, languid lugubriousness of The Leopard. On the other hand, this film allowed Delon to play on his public image as a bit of a megalomaniac, in the role of Julius Caesar.
An icon of global cinema
Despite being a controversial character, Delon remains an icon in artistic circles, with an eclectic array of prominent figures, including Sofia Coppola, Quentin Tarantino, Madonna and Marianne Faithfull, continuing to pay tribute.
In French popular culture, he is still thought of as one of the giants of world cinema, thanks to the hypnotic, enigmatic beauty of his performances – qualities which have also lent themselves to the commercialisation of his image, most notably in the case of Dior, which uses his image in cologne adverts, and the brand of cigarettes sold in Cambodia that has borne his name for years.
It seems that Delon was aware of his iconic status, given his occasional propensity for referring to himself in the third person. But he spoke in the first person when looking back on his career as he accepted the Palme d’Honneur: “When I started my career, I knew that the hardest thing was to last, and I lasted for 62 years. Now I know that the hardest thing is to leave, because I know I’m going to do so,” he said in tears.
