Film: An angel in the form of a devil: film legend Alain Delon is dead

Hat pulled low over his face, collar turned up, stoic expression: This is how the world discovered Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Cruel Intentions”. The actor became a legend, repeatedly shining in front of the camera as a killer in more than 80 films. Now Delon has died at the age of 88.

As the actor’s three children told the French news agency AFP, he died peacefully and surrounded by his family in his house in Douchy in the Centre-Val de Loire region. “Alain Fabien, Anouchka, Anthony and (his dog) Loubo are deeply saddened to announce the death of their father,” they said in a joint press release.

Strong roles as screen killers

Delon left behind masterpieces of film history for posterity. “Endstation Scaffold”, “Nur die Sonne war Zeuge”, “Borsalino” or “The Panther”: Delon made his career primarily through roles as a smart crook and unscrupulous screen murderer.

He slipped into the skin of a murderer in his debut film “The Killers” in 1957. He showed that the pretty boy could also play other sides in Volker Schlöndorff’s “Swann in Love” in 1984. In it he played a homosexual baron.

He surprised everyone as a loser in “Notre Histoire”, a tragic love drama for which he even received a César, France’s coveted film award, in 1985. But the audience did not like the gentle Delon. “As soon as I played suffering or weak people, people rejected me.” They wanted to see the “angel in the form of the devil”, as Delon said.

Biography reads like a social drama

And so Delon preferred to play the elegantly killing and lonely fighter. A role for which he did not need a script. He did not need to play the criminal, as he explains in the documentary “Alain Delon, cet inconnu” (Alain Delon, this unknown man) by Philippe Kohly. If not a film actor, he would have preferred to be a gangster, the “Spiegel” also quoted him as saying.

Delon’s biography reads like a social drama: first his parents divorce, then the four-year-old is placed in a foster family, then he is expelled from school several times, begins an apprenticeship as a butcher and finally, at the age of 17, volunteers as a soldier for the Indochina War. After his return, he keeps himself afloat with dubious business deals. He is even said to have contacts with the mafia in Paris and Marseille.

In connection with a murder

Alain Delon was born on November 8, 1935 in Sceaux near Paris. He later said of his early years: “How many people know that I spent my childhood in prison? At least in the prison yard of Fresnes, where I played with other children of prison guards.” Delon’s foster father was a prison guard.

Even later, as a celebrated film star, there were overlaps between his roles and reality. In 1968, his Yugoslavian bodyguard and friend Stevan Markovič was murdered. He was found in a garbage dump. Markovič was not only Delon’s bodyguard, but also the alleged lover of his then wife and actress Nathalie Delon, alias Francine Canovas. The tabloid press linked Delon’s name to the case. In 1975, however, the Markovič file was closed – without result.

Many loves, many affairs

Delon also filled the pages of the gossip press with his affairs with women. He formed one of the most glamorous couples of the 1960s with Romy Schneider. They both got engaged. But their love story ended just as unhappily as the one in “Christine”, in which the two first starred together in 1958.

Five years later, Delon separated from her. In 1963, Schneider attempted suicide. Just a year later, he married actress Francine Canovas, the only woman he married. Shortly afterwards, their son Anthony was born.

One of his “coup de foudre”, love at first sight, was the model Rosalie van Breemen. Delon met the Dutch woman, who was around 30 years younger than him, in 1987. Their relationship, which lasted around 15 years, produced two children, Anouchka and Alain-Fabien.

The womanizer also had a brief affair with the German singer Nico, who died in 1988. The pop culture icon claimed throughout her life that Delon was the father of her son Christian Aaron “Ari” Päffgen, which the film legend always denied.

Selected by Romy Schneider

Women not only determined his private life, but also his career. He got into acting through women. They wanted him, made him and gave him everything, he said in an interview in the French newspaper “Le Monde”.

When Delon filmed “Christine” with Schneider in 1958, he was 23 and she was three years younger. She was already a star at the time, and Delon was still at the beginning of his career. He is said to have her to thank for his role in the melodrama, as Thilo Wydra wrote in the 2020 double biography “A Love in Paris. Romy & Alain”.

According to the actor and friend of Delon, Jean-Claude Brialy, whom he quoted in the interview, she was shown photos of several young actors. She chose Delon. “All I had to show was my looks and my lack of experience. When I found out that they wanted me, I was speechless,” Wydra Delon said in an interview with the French daily newspaper “Le Figaro”.

But Michèle Cordou was the decisive factor in his career. She was the wife of Yves Allégret, director of Delon’s first film, “Les réseaux de résistance”. The actress Brigitte Auber had introduced the young charmer to her.

A gentle yet brutal actor

Delon’s beautiful face fascinated women and men alike. Luchino Visconti was one of them. The director, who was 30 years older at the time, shot the masterpieces “The Leopard” and “Rocco and His Brothers” with Delon. Visconti wanted a gentle yet brutal actor, he said in Kohly’s documentary. In the workers’ epic, Delon plays a young Italian who tries to save his family from falling apart by any means necessary.

Since his separation from Rosalie van Breemen in the early 2000s, he has lived mostly alone. Even as an actor, he has increasingly retreated from the limelight in recent years. Instead, he has made a name for himself as a film producer, horse breeder, racing stable owner and sympathizer of the Front National (FN). He called the ultra-right party founder Jean Marie Le Pen his friend.

Argument with children

In 2019, Delon suffered a stroke from which he never fully recovered. In 2022, he said he was considering active euthanasia in Switzerland, where he also lived for a long time. He explained to TV5 that at a certain age, one has the right to say goodbye in peace. He was not granted that. For months, his three children, Anthony, Anouchka and Alain-Fabien, fought over who would care for Delon.

The star has cultivated his myth throughout his life. “My life is like an iceberg. The public only sees the tip,” he once said. His true face now remains his secret.