Alain Delon died at the age of 88 on August 18, 2024. One of the icons of French cinema, who went from cafe waiter to international star, lived a life worthy of a novel. Fascinating, he was both angel and demon. Portrait.
A blue velvet look. A wise child's nose. Lips to die for and a smile to die for. A beauty to die for. As a young man, Alain Delon was an angel. A disturbing angel. Deep in his eyes, flashes of violence. Behind soft skin, clenched jaws. And carnivorous teeth that, when the time comes, will bite without mercy. Alain Delon was a demon. It was this ambivalence that was fascinating about him: we could expect anything from the actor. Either it gives love or it gives death. No doubt because he had grown up between hells and paradises, and what is perhaps even worse, indifference: so it is with unloved children.
Read also:
Death of Alain Delon: the actor died at the age of 88
Alain Delon's family has roots in Occitanie and more precisely in Saint-Vincent Lespinasse, in Tarn-et-Garonne. He was born in Sceaux (Haute-de-Seine) on November 8, 1935. Father, cinema manager, mother, pharmacist, everything could have turned like a reel. But the parents divorced, and in the 1940s things got complicated. Alain finds himself in a host family with a warden at Fresnes prison. At ten years old, in 1945, he heard the volley in the yard that shot Pierre Laval, the head of the French government under the Nazi occupation. A terrible memory that will haunt him forever.
He takes boxes to Les Halles
Another divorce. Another abandonment. His second father-in-law is the owner of a butcher shop. The teenager will become an apprentice butcher. But he still has something in his blood. A thirst for adventure: he enlisted in the Navy. Indochina Directorate. Except the army doesn't work for him either. We bust him for stealing, then punish him for a trip where he wrecked a jeep.
In Saigon, at the cinema, he discovered Do not touch grease. Gabin triumphs. Can he dream that eight years later he will be the equal of “Pasha” in? Melody in the basement ? For now, he's back in Paris doing jobs. He takes crates to Halles, becomes a waiter. His dark side also causes him to have escapades with the bad guys. It frequents mackerel, halflings and amazons.
A diamond in the rough
Other meetings will save him. Curious coincidence: in 1956, he was friends with his next-door neighbor, a certain Dalila, an Egyptian who came to Paris to make films. She would later become famous singing under the name… Dalida. It was above all his meeting with the actress Brigitte Aubert (she played with Cary Grant in Hand in collar by Alfred Hitchcock), which will be decisive. She takes her boyfriend to trendy clubs, to the sets, backstage. And there, directors and actors fall under the spell of this charming kid with his mesmerizing beauty.
Actor? Delon didn't think about it. We think about it for him, we push ourselves into the limelight. Directors are not wrong. They know they are dealing with a diamond in the rough. “Talk while you're talking to me. Watch how you look at me. Listen how you listen to me. Don't sing! Live,” Yves Allégret orders him, Lee Strasberg-style, as he directs him in When the woman gets involved. And it works. Delon breaks the screen.
Love at first sight with Romy Schneider
In 1958, on the sets of Christinemeets Romy Schneider: love at first sight, mutual, is immediate. Their romance explodes in the news. I've never seen such a beautiful couple, and their engagement on the shores of Lake Lugano is getting the press going.
In 1960, Delon took his place among the stars, with full sun by René Clement. In this confrontation between two men, Delon had to play the victim. He sits in the director's chair, pestering the producers to play the other character. Clément's wife is the one who convinces her husband: “The little one is right!”. The other main role goes to Maurice Ronet. The two boys will become friends. The actress Marie Laforêt will keep the memory of “two scoundrels”, pretentious and contemptuous!
His idol, Jean Gabin
Regardless, his career is launched. He then produced several masterpieces, one after another, such as Rocco and his brothers Or cheetahby the master Luchino Visconti. In France, he joined the man who was his idol, Jean Gabin Melody in the basement. His story with Romy Schneider fades, but they will remain friends forever. In 1968, Pool it brings them together on screen, not in private.
Weird Nico, the muse of Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, is dying … to have a son, Ari Boulogne, dead at 60 on May 20, 2023, never recognized by Alain Delonbut which will be raised by the actor's own mother.
Sometimes a cop, sometimes a thug…and Anthony Delon's father
The old friend Dalida also stops by… They share, for a while, a little more than Words, words, words… Eclipse, Felines, The Centurions, Adventurers. Adventures, thrillers, dramas, Delon had a series of successes in the 60s His partner was Gabin, Ventura, Montand. He married the woman who would become Nathalie Delon. With her it will turn into a confusion Gently the bass : Delon plays a priest a little too sexy not to be tempted, one of the actor's rare comedies. Nathalie is the mother of Anthony Delon.
In 1967, it will be released samurai. Melville is at the top of his game, and so is Delon. Gray hat, putty raincoat, face closed in blocked emotion, we are in classical tragedy, a gun mount in Aeschylus. In addition, Delon will keep the same look for a series of films in which he is sometimes a cop, sometimes a thug, sometimes on the light side, sometimes on the dark side, and very often both. Producers weave a shock duo, with Belmondo: it will be Borsalino : guaranteed histrionics against the backdrop of the Marseille underworld of the 1930s.
Alain Delon lives with Mireille Darc for 15 years
Underworld? She is never very far away. In 1968, the Markovic business broke out. This former employee of Alain Delon, then married to Nathalie, is found murdered in a garbage dump. During the investigation, the police gravitate around this curious character, a community figure who threw beautiful parties in the upper class. The scandal almost splashed Georges Pompidou. The death of this man remains a mystery even today. Of which Alain Delon may have some keys. He organizes boxing matches, horse races: we are not in the middle, we are on the edge.
The casting chance puts him in the arms of Mireille Darc. The “Great Locust”, with whom he lived for fifteen years, seems one of the rare ones who can appease his angel's demons. He doesn't want to do Delon anymore. He takes risks. back Mr. Kleinfable about antisemitism with Joseph Losey. In 1984, he crashed against the odds Our story by the anarcho-provocateur Bertrand Blier. And he won a César for best actor: a late and paradoxical consecration.
Anouchka and Alain-Fabien her other two children
He then stuck by co-writing and co-producing the biggest flop of his career, The passageby René Manzor. Later, the 90s gave him only gentleness. He finds Belmondo for kindness One chance in two where the ancestors play. Between 1987 and 2001, he lived with Rosali, the mother of Anouchka and Alain-Fabien.
When the 21ste century, Delon no longer wants cinema. And it seems mutual. However, he will happily play policemen once again, in Marseille, for television, becoming Fabio Montale and Franck Riva.
Alone in his house in Douchy
Delon banishes dark thoughts with his passions. He is bringing his own brand of luxury products to life and will be admired in Japan. The former butcher's boy is a discerning art lover who loves Pierre SoulagesNicolas de Stael, Jean Dubuffet. He gets a taste for the theater again. He becomes president for life of the Miss France committee. Then he he resigned, because his support for the National Front was shocking his peers. Rather reactive, above all unclassifiable: he calls himself a Gaullist, he had called Giscard to vote, he is friends with Le Pen, he adores Sarkozy before he befriended Fillon. At the same time, he admires Visconti, communist and homosexual, defends Losey, victim of McCarthyism, wants Jack Lang to decorate him, supports Anne Hidalgo and in 2018 signs a column on global warming, along with many artists from the LEFT.
Nothing makes him forget Romy, who died in 1982, Nico, who died in 1988, Mireille, who died in 2017, Vera Baudey, his last companion who died in 2019. He still had played only one role, that of Alain, a role he played for his marionette Les Guignols. Speaking to himself in the third person, he began to look back on his life, contemplating his own journey, thinking, as Simone Signoret, one of his partners, would have written, that Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
Severely weakened after suffering a stroke in 2019, the legend of French cinema has since been in a health condition more than painful to live with. In 2023, a fratricidal war is doubling down, through media and justice, between Alain Delon's children whom each swears to protect.
He had lived almost alone for 20 years in his house in Douchy, with 35 mm memories, the ghosts of his loves and, no doubt, the eternal discomfort of an unloved child. A dagger that the Samurai had always stuck in his heart.