Alain Delon obituary: icily beautiful icon of French popular and arthouse cinema

Blessed with stunning good looks, Alain Delon, who has died aged 88, was destined for stardom. Beauty, drive and charisma more than compensated for lack of formal training. Together with the good fortune of working with gifted filmmakers such as Luchino Visconti, René Clément, Jean-Pierre Melville and Joseph Losey, they made him one of the greatest stars of post-war French cinema, across both auteur and popular films. He indelibly marked his era, projecting a powerful but enigmatic and ambiguous type of masculinity.

Delon was born in 1935 to a modest family in the suburbs of Paris. His mother wanted him to follow in the footsteps of his charcutier stepfather. Having reluctantly completed his apprenticeship, he rapidly escaped by volunteering to fight in Indochina. Back in France he picked up odd jobs, but his looks soon attracted attention, notably from the influential film journalist and agent Georges Beaume.

His lasting image sprang from Clément’s Plein Soleil (1960), the first adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, in which, against the producers’ initial wishes, Delon cannily insisted on playing the clever, cynical killer Ripley. One critic dubbed this influential thriller “pure contemplation of the star’s icy beauty”. Indeed, Delon’s beauty emerged as a defining characteristic of his star persona in an intriguing way. He was often compared to James Dean, and many comments were made about his ‘diabolical’, ‘androgynous’ or ‘ambivalent’ beauty. Some films turned him into the blatant object of women’s, and sometimes men’s, gaze. Stories, framing and the use of mirrors emphasised his magnetic good looks, almost to the point of narcissism: camera angles and lighting privileged the flash of the blue eyes, the chiselled cheek bones, the boyish lock of dark hair. Put differently, the camera objectified him as it normally objectified women.

The same year as Plein Soleil, the world also discovered Delon as the eponymous hero of Visconti’s epic family drama Rocco and His Brothers. The encounter with Visconti was momentous in other ways, leading to critical respect, a brief career on stage, and a leading part in the director’s sumptuous The Leopard (1963) – was there ever a more beautiful leading couple than Delon and Claudia Cardinale, both at the height of their youthful glory? It also allowed Delon to pursue an on-off Italian career, which included Michelangelo Antonioni’s modernist masterpiece L’eclisse in 1962. So spectacular was Delon’s rise to fame that as early as 1964 he was given the accolade of a retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française, the national film museum in Paris. 

Inevitably, Hollywood beckoned. With great hopes of an international career, Delon set off for Los Angeles, making retrospectively unwise remarks about the parochialism of French and European cinema. But neither Once a Thief (1965) nor Lost Command (1966) – nor later Michael Winner’s Scorpio (1973) and the 1979 Airport sequel The Concorde… Airport ’79 – would add anything to his reputation. Like many French actors in Hollywood, he ended up playing caricatures of himself or second fiddle to Hollywood stars like Dean Martin or Burt Lancaster. 

Sustained fame and glory for Delon would always be firmly based in French cinema, where – like his contemporary and rival Jean-Paul Belmondo – Delon was developing a tough-guy image in films that reached a broad popular fan base. He starred to great effect in heist movies like Any Number Can Win (1963) and The Sicilian Clan (1969), in both cases partnering the veteran star Jean Gabin, and in the costume gangster movie Borsalino (1970) with Belmondo. The gangster image took him to the top of the French box-office and made him a cult star in East Asia, where he was considered an ideal of Western masculine beauty and where a popular brand of cigarettes and a line in cosmetics were named after him (conversely, director Jean-Pierre Melville noted that there was “something Japanese about him”). 

Melville’s brilliant gangster trilogy of Le Samouraï (1967), Le Cercle rouge (1970) and Un flic (1972) shifted Delon’s tough-guy figure decisively towards a more sombre, laconic, even melancholy identity, a pared-down image of interiorised masculinity that would accompany him for the rest of his career. At the same time his public persona took a more lurid turn. In October 1968, Delon’s secretary Stefan Markovic, a Yugoslav national with dubious connections, was found assassinated in a rubbish dump near Paris. The circumstances of the murder have never been fully elucidated, and at one point suspicion briefly fell on Delon himself. The affair revealed his links with underworld figures like Markovic and the Corsican mafioso François Marcantoni. His reputation was also tainted by association with Markovic’s activities, which were understood to include blackmail and organising sex-parties for top-ranking personalities.

This murky off-screen episode did nothing to damage Delon’s screen stardom, however. In the 1970s he starred in a series of highly successful crime movies, but now increasingly as a flic (cop) rather than a gangster, in revealingly titled films such as Un flic, Flic Story (1975), Pour la peau d’un flic (1981, which he directed himself), Parole de flic (1985) and Ne réveillez pas un flic qui dort (1988). In these films, his persona hardened into a more brutal and misogynist figure, though still shrouded in minimalist cool. 

In this capacity he had a huge popular following but incurred the disapproval of critics who felt that he was betraying the prestigious art films of his beginnings. Yet he continued to work with respected auteurs, in particular on Joseph Losey’s Mr. Klein (1976), Volker Schlöndorff’s Swann in Love (1984) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague (1990), justifying his two-tiered career with the comment: “If I made gun-movies, it is precisely to produce films like Mr. Klein.” In the latter, Losey perfectly matched Delon’s enigmatic star image to the lethal ambiguities of the German occupation of France, in which Klein/Delon is pursued by an ambiguous alter ego.

The tough-guy image that sustained Delon for two decades in his popular films started to fade in the late 1980s, and films such as Le Retour de Casanova (1992, for which he deliberately put on weight) and Le Jour et la Nuit (1997, directed by philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy), were spectacular failures. By the time Patrice Leconte reunited the Belmondo-Delon duo in Une chance sur deux (1998), in which both ageing stars play ‘father’ to Lolita-like Vanessa Paradis, the popularity of that image was long gone and the film flopped despite its starry cast. 

By then, though, Delon had wisely shifted his attention from acting only to producing and directing, and to television. There he worked as presenter and defender of classic films, and as star and producer of the high-budget mini-series Cinéma (1988), yet another failure. In 1998 he reappeared on the Parisian stage, in Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s Variations énigmatiques at the Théâtre de Paris, this time with success. Also more successful was Fabio Montale (2001), a television mini-series adapted from Jean-Claude Izzo’s cult Marseille-based detective stories, although Delon’s starring role was initially controversial, his conspicuously right-wing politics – he was a fervent Gaullist and, more controversially, a friend of Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front (now National Rally) – being at odds with Izzo’s well-known left tendencies.

Beyond the well-publicised ups and down of his family life and relationships, Delon remains a towering figure in French and European cinema. He graced and symbolised a whole period of post-war French cinema, when stars shone with a special aura and could, on their name alone, attract huge audiences – as recognised by his honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2019. His death in many ways signals the passing of truly popular cinema. “He was more than a star,” as President Emmanuel Macron noted, he was “a monument.”

• Alain Delon, 8 November 1935 to 18 August 2024