Last Sunday morning, news broke that brought the film world to a standstill: iconic French actor Alain Delon had passed away, at the age of 88. Bazaar looks back on the actor’s life, during which he achieved an iconic but controversial status that will live on even after his death.
Alain Delon: the male Brigitte Bardot
Fellow icon and good friend Brigitte Bardot was one of the first to speak out about Delon’s passing, with a handwritten letter on X. The now 89-year-old Bardot called her good friend an ‘ambassador of elegance, talent and beauty’. His passing, she says, leaves her with ‘a gigantic void that nothing and no one can fill’. It is only fitting that Bardot expresses himself in this way. The two were often mentioned in the same breath, with Delon being seen as ‘male Bardot’. Not least because of his sultry, mysterious and handsome appearance, which made him a notorious sex symbol. And a womanizer, because Delon had relationships with several women. Think for example of his relationship with Romy Schneider, with whom we saw him on screen in The Swimming Pool (1969). But among them was also the Dutch Rosalie van Breemen, who was together with Delon from 1987 to 2001 and with whom he had two children despite an age difference of 31 years.
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Rosalie van Breemen and Alain Delon at the Cannes Film Festival in 1992.
Loved by directors
The quality of Alain Delon’s acting remained controversial among critics throughout his career, but he nevertheless remained beloved by the greatest directors of ‘his’ time, from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. He became a star in the most iconic French and Italian film titles of the time, including The Samurai (1967), The Swimming Pool (1969) in Borsalino (1970). Delon also produced a film himself in 1976, which won awards in France. Mr. Klein, directed by Joseph Losey, in which he plays a wealthy art dealer in occupied Paris who is suspected of being Jewish.
In 1997, Delon announced that he would be leaving his acting career behind completely, after a series of failures. However, ten years later he saw room for an exception, and appeared as Julius Caesar in Asterix at the Olympic Games.
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Controversies
Delon’s life off-screen was often controversial. This began in his youth, when he was first bounced from foster home to foster home, and then joined the French army, from which he was subsequently discharged after stealing a jeep. Later in life, his political views and treatment of women were criticized.
Alain Delon has passed away
88-year-old Alain Delon died last Sunday at 03:00 in his home in Douchy, near the Belgian border. His death was peaceful and surrounded by his children, they announced in a joint press release on Sunday morning.
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