Alain Delon, icon and last sacred monster of French cinema, has died at the age of 88

“Cinema is very lucky to have you. Because you are a man of conviction, true and full of audacity,” Anouchka Delon told her father in 2019, when she presented him with the Honorary Palme d’honneur at the Cannes Film Festival. Moved to tears, the actor said goodbye to the world of cinema that day. A world he had inhabited for sixty-two years, the length of a flamboyant career.

Each of his films tells the story of Alain Delon’s complexity as much as they reflect that of an era. The one where, in the cinemas of France and Italy, he bursts onto the screen with Rocco and his brothers, dazzles with his “Cheetah” look, fascinates in his “Samurai” role.

A cheeky beauty

Born on November 8, 1935 in Sceaux, in the Hauts-de-Seine, the young Alain had an unstable childhood after his parents’ divorce, followed by four years of Indochina War in the marine fusiliers. Demobilized, he hung around Saint-Germain-des-Prés in 1957. His handsome face and his steel blue eyes were very quickly spotted there by the filmmaker Yves Allégret who cast him in When the woman gets involved. His career is launched. Everything is accelerating.

Between 1960 and 1975, Delon would experience fifteen years of total glory. In full sun from René Clément to Cop Story by Jacques Deray, the actor composes powerful roles under the direction of prestigious directors such as Melville, Visconti, Antonioni, Losey, Godard, Malle… Off screen, the French public is fascinated by the tumultuous love affairs of the big cat with Nathalie (his first wife, mother of their son Anthony), Romy Schneider, Mireille Darc or, much later, with Rosalie van Breemen (the mother of Anouchka and Alain-Fabien). The celebrity press is fond of these love affairs: the man intrigues his audience. Could he be as complex as his characters?

Enigmatic, icy and insolently beautiful, it is true that the star captivates as much as she irritates. “Beauty, the most beautiful of injustices, is always suspected, envied. And he never sought to make it lovable, sociable, definable,” Jean-Marc Parisis (1) explained to the magazine She in 2018.

Repeated controversies

But if Delon disappointed his public, it was never as an artist, but rather as a man exuding a whiff of scandal. In October 1968, his name was mentioned in the press when his former right-hand man, Stevan Markovic, was found murdered in a wood in Elancourt. Delon was questioned. There was talk of a case of drug trafficking or of doctored photos intended to compromise the wife of the former Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou. If the Markovic affair ended in a dismissal in 1976, the star’s image would be darkened in public opinion.

With his outspoken outbursts, Delon continued to confuse people from the mid-1980s, particularly when he claimed sympathy for the ideas of Jean-Marie Le Pen or, declaring in 2017, on the set of It’s up to you, that “homosexuality is against nature”…

After these latest exploits, the lone wolf had chosen to live in seclusion on his property in Loiret, declaring that he led an existence in harmony with his dogs, cats, birds and works of art. Victim of a stroke in 2019, he was unable to resume his career as he had, for a time, hoped.

Tears and divisions in the Delon clan

In 2024, his children Anthony, Alain-Fabien and Anouchka publicly tore each other apart over the care and presence to provide for their father. Darkness took over from light. Following this family conflict, the 88-year-old actor was placed under reinforced guardianship and assisted by a legal representative for his medical follow-up.

On her Instagram account, his daughter Anouchka continued to post messages full of love, expressing her affection and loyalty as a child, beyond all the tensions made public. “I don’t like the world today. Nothing really excites me, yet I was passionate. What I lack is desire, passion,” Alain Delon said in an interview with Paris Match in May 2013. I especially want to share as much as possible with my children. I don’t want to die alone.” A wish that the star, hopefully, may have seen granted.

(1) Author of the essay A problem with beauty. Delon in the eyes, published by Fayard in 2018.