Legendary French actor Alain Delon has died at the age of 88 in Douchy, central France, his three children announced in a statement to AFP on Sunday. “Alain Fabien, Anouchka, Anthony and (his dog) Loubo announce with deep regret the passing of their father. He passed away peacefully at his home in Douchy, surrounded by his three children and his family,” the statement said. The “family asks that their privacy be respected at this time of extremely painful mourning,” it added.
“The actor of ‘A pleno sol’ and ‘El silencio de un hombre’ has gone to meet (the Virgin) Mary among the stars so dear to him,” it added. The “family asks that their privacy be respected in this moment of extremely painful mourning,” said his children. The actor died “very early in the middle of the night,” they said.
A difficult childhood
Born outside Paris on November 8, 1935, Delon started life on the wrong foot: he was placed in foster care at age four after his parents divorced. A few years ago he alleged that he had been sexually harassed as a youth. He ran away from home at least once and was expelled from boarding schools several times before joining the Marines at 17 and serving in then French-ruled Indochina. There he also got into trouble for a stolen jeep.
Back in France in the mid-1950s, he worked as a porter at Paris’s wholesale food market, Les Halles, and spent time in the Pigalle district, a red-light district, before migrating to the cafés of the bohemian St. Germain des Pres area. There he met the French actor Jean-Claude Brialy, who took him to the Cannes Film Festival, where he attracted the attention of an American talent scout who arranged a screen test. He made his film debut in 1957 in Quand la femme s’en mele.
An icon of French cinema
Delon rose to fame in two films for Italian director Luchino Visconti, “Rocco and His Brothers” in 1960 and “The Leopard” in 1963. He starred opposite venerable French elder Jean Gabin in Henri Verneuil’s 1963 film “Melodie en Sous-Sol” (“Big Move on the Côte d’Azur”) and had a big hit in Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 “Le Samourai” (“The Silence of a Man”). The role of a philosophical hitman involved minimal dialogue and frequent solo scenes in which Delon shined.
Delon became a star in France and was idolised by men and women alike in Japan, but he never became as famous in Hollywood despite working with American cinema giants including Burt Lancaster when the Frenchman played the apprentice hitman Scorpio in the 1973 film of the same name. He did not deny his real-life mob connections: “Most of them, the gangsters I know … were my friends before I became an actor,” he said in an interview with the New York Times in 1970. “I’m not worried about what a friend does. Everyone is responsible for their own actions. It doesn’t matter what they do.”
In the 1970 film “Borsalino,” he starred alongside fellow Frenchman Jean-Paul Belmondo, playing gangsters who come to blows in an unforgettable, stylized fight over a woman. His highlights also include the 1969 erotic thriller “La Piscine” (“The Swimming Pool”), in which Delon teamed with his real-life lover, Romy Schneider, in a sensual saga of jealousy and seduction on the French Riviera.
Last years in the shadows
Little seen since the 1990s, Alain Delon hit the headlines in the summer of 2023 when his three children filed a complaint against his lady-in-waiting, Hiromi Rollin, sometimes described as his companion, accusing her of taking advantage of his weakness. In recent years, Delon rarely left his residence in Douchy, in the Loire Valley region of France.
His three children then waged a fratricidal war through the media and the courts over the actor’s health, who was suffering from lymphoma and suffered a stroke in 2019. In May 2019, he returned to the red carpet at Cannes to receive an honorary Palme d’Or, amid tears and a speech with testamentary overtones. “It’s a bit of a posthumous tribute, but while he was alive,” said Alain Delon on the occasion.
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