Alain Delon, the French actor best known for his performances in the films of New Wave director Jean-Pierre Melville, has died aged 88.
“He passed away peacefully at his home in Douchy, surrounded by his three children and family,” his family said in a statement to AFP.
In addition to “Le Samourai,” Delon also starred in Melville’s brilliant heist film “Le Cercle rouge” and “Un Flic.”
Other important films in which she acted were René Clement’s Purple Noon; Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers and The Leopard; Antonioni’s L’Eclisse; José Giovanni’s Two Men in Town; and Joseph Losey’s Mr. Klein.
After Jean-Paul Belmondo defined the French cool style at the beginning of the New Wave in Godard’s Breathless, Delon and director Melville very consciously redefined it in Le Samourai, where he played a hitman who always adjusted his hat to make it fit perfectly, and as a result, the actor was compared to James Dean.
Delon’s extraordinary appeal was crystallized in “Le Samourai.” Film scholar David Thomson described him as “the enigmatic angel of French cinema, only 32 in 1967 and almost feminine. Yet so serious and immaculate that he could be considered either lethal or potent. By then, he was also close to the real French underworld.” Thomson added: “Delon is not so much a good actor as a striking presence; no wonder he was so excited to realize that what Melville needed most was his willingness to be photographed.”
Roger Ebert called Delon “the tough guy of French cinema, an actor so incredibly handsome that his best strategy for dealing with his appearance was to wear a poker face.”
In “Le Samourai,” Melville meticulously follows Delon’s killer, Jeff Costello, as he creates an alibi, eliminates a nightclub owner, goes through a police lineup, discovers that his employers have betrayed him, and is hunted by the police. The plot is far less important than the style of the film, the style of Delon’s portrayal of the killer.
Delon’s first major film was Rene Clement’s Purple Noon (1960), an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, in which Delon played the sociopathic Tom Ripley, who murders his friend and steals his identity. The film made the actor a star.
In Visconti’s excellent drama “Rocco and His Brothers,” also from 1960, Delon plays the title character, part of a poor family that moves north to Milan from southern Italy in search of better opportunities.
A few years later, Delon teamed with Visconti again on the director’s 1963 masterpiece The Leopard, in which Burt Lancaster played a 19th-century Sicilian prince trying to come to terms with the revolution and what it would mean for his family and social class. Delon played his handsome nephew, who falls in with the revolutionaries and then joins the king’s army; in the film, Delon had palpable chemistry with the beautiful Claudia Cardinale.
In 1962, Delon starred opposite Monica Vitti in Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, the second installment of the director’s famous trilogy about alienation. Delon was perfectly cast in the role of a deceitful stockbroker who becomes involved with Vitti’s character but is neither willing nor able to meet her emotional needs.
In 1969, she starred alongside Romy Schneider and Maurice Ronet in the erotic thriller “La Piscine” (The Swimming Pool).
Delon starred alongside Richard Burton (who played the title character), Schneider and Valentina Cortese in Joseph Losey’s 1972 film The Assassination of Trotsky and a few years later worked for Losey in the brilliant Mr. Klein, in which Delon gave a tightly controlled performance as a Catholic art dealer in occupied Paris who preys on wealthy Jews with art collections that are whisked away, but begins to have problems of his own as he is increasingly mistaken for a slippery Jew using his name for secret operations. Delon was one of the film’s producers.
Delon starred in three films with the French superstar of an earlier generation, Jean Gabin: the police dramas Any Number Can Win (1963), The Sicilian Clan (1969) and Two Men in Town (1973), the last of which also featured, in a small role, a young Gerard Depardieu and thus bridged three generations.
Delon also had a supporting role as a photographer behind Shirley MacLaine in the 1964 international production of “The Yellow Rolls Royce,” starring Rex Harrison and Ingrid Bergman.
The actor was among a host of French stars (and a few Americans, including Kirk Douglas and Glenn Ford) who populated René Clément’s rambling tale of the final days of the Nazi occupation of the French capital, Is Paris Burning? (1966).
In 1971, Delon starred alongside Charles Bronson, Toshiro Mifune, Ursula Andress and Capucine in the international production “Red Sun” directed by Terence Young; the western, filmed in Spain, was not very successful in the United States, but was successful in Europe and Asia.
In 1973, Delon reunited with his “The Leopard” co-star Burt Lancaster for the Michael Winner-directed thriller “Scorpio,” in which Delon played an assassin ordered to eliminate Lancaster’s weary spy, who wants out of the game.
Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon was born in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine. His father was of French and Corsican Italian descent, his mother of French and German descent. His parents divorced early on and Delon’s troubled childhood included frequent expulsions from school. After military service in French Indochina, he took odd jobs in Paris, where he met the actor Jean Claude Brialy, who invited him to the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, where Delon made some professional contacts.
She made her film debut the following year with a small role in Yves Allegret’s Send a Woman When the Devil Fails.
While David O. Selznick was in Italy filming A Farewell to Arms, he met Delon and offered him a Hollywood contract on the condition that the budding actor learn English, but Delon dismissed such ideas, although he did make three American films over the years.
In the early 1980s, Delon had a period in which he sought a career behind the camera, directing and starring in several crime films, but was not very successful.
He adapted several novels for film during the 1980s and produced 30 of his films.
He starred as the title character in the French television crime drama “Frank Riva” in 2003–04 and as Julius Caesar in the 2008 film “Asterix at the Olympic Games.”
In 1969, he was involved in a scandal that had criminal and political dimensions. Stevan Markovic, his former bodyguard, was murdered and investigators found a letter linking Delon to a Corsican fighter named François Marcantoni. The Delons were questioned by police over the murder.
Delon’s love life aroused great interest in the French media. He had relationships with several women over the years, including actress Romy Schneider, model Rosalie van Breemen and actress Mireille Darc.
He was awarded the honorary Palme d’Or in 2019. His family placed him under guardianship in 2024 after he suffered a stroke in 2019.
