French actor Alain Delon dies at age 88, French media report

French actor Alain Delon, who in his post-war glory days melted the hearts of millions of film fans, whether he played a murderer, gangster or hitman, has died, French media reported Sunday. He was 88.

Delon had been in poor health since suffering a stroke in 2019 and rarely left his estate in Douchy, in the French Val de Loire region.

With his striking blue eyes, Delon was sometimes called the “French Frank Sinatra” because of his good looks, a comparison Delon did not appreciate. Unlike Sinatra, who always denied having any ties to the Mafia, Delon openly acknowledged his shady friends in the underworld.

In a 1970 interview with The New York TimesDelon was asked about such acquaintances, including one of the last “godfathers” of the underworld in the Mediterranean port of Marseille.

“Most of them, the gangsters I know … were my friends before I became an actor,” he said. “I don’t worry about what a friend does. Everyone is responsible for his own act. It doesn’t matter what he does.”

Delon rose to fame in two films by Italian director Luchino Visconti, Rocco and his brothers in 1960 and The leopard from 1963.

He co-starred with the venerable French elder Jean Gabin in Henri Verneuil’s 1963 film Melody under the sun (Any number can win) and was a big hit in Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 The Samurai (The godchild). The role of a philosophical assassin featured minimal dialogue and many solo scenes, and Delon excelled in it.

Delon became a star in France and was idolized by men and women in Japan, but he never made it to Hollywood, despite starring alongside American film giants, including Burt Lancaster when the Frenchman played the apprentice assassin Scorpio in the 1973 film of the same name.

In the 1970 film Borsalino, he co-starred with fellow French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo as gangsters who engage in an unforgettable, stylized fight over a woman.

Highlights also included the 1969 erotic thriller The swimming pool (The swimming pool), in which Delon enters into a relationship with his real-life lover Romy Schneider, in a sultry saga full of jealousy and seduction on the French Riviera.

Man in trouble

Delon was born on November 8, 1935, just outside Paris. His life began on a low flame: at the age of four, he was placed in foster care after his parents divorced.

He ran away from home at least once and was expelled from boarding schools several times before joining the Marines at age 17 and serving in then French-ruled Indochina, where he also got into trouble for a stolen jeep.

In the mid-1950s he returned to France and worked as a porter at the Parisian wholesale food market Les Halles. He also spent time in the red-light district of Pigalle, before moving to the cafés of the bohemian St. Germain des Pres district.

There he met French actor Jean-Claude Brialy, who took him to the Cannes Film Festival. There he caught the attention of an American talent scout, who arranged a screen test for him.

He made his film debut in 1957 in When the woman is with me (Send a woman when the devil fails).

Sulphurous friends

Delon was both a businessman and an actor, who used his looks to sell branded cosmetics and dabbled in racehorses with old underworld friends. He invested in a racehorse stable with Jacky “Le Mat” Imbert, a notorious figure in a thriving Marseille crime scene.

Delon’s less serious friendships came to the surface when a former bodyguard/confidant, a young Yugoslav named Stefan Markovic, was found dead in a bag, with a bullet in his head, dumped in a garbage dump near Paris.

The actor was questioned by the police and acquitted, but the ‘Markovic affair’ grew into a national scandal.

The man charged by police with Markovic’s murder (he was later acquitted) was Francois Marcantoni, a Corsican café owner and friend of Delon who lived in the bustling Pigalle district in the aftermath of World War II.

pronounced

Delon also made off-stage statements that caused controversy, notably deploring the abolition of the death penalty and disparaging gay marriage, which was legalized in France in 2013.

He publicly defended the far-right Front National and called its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, an old friend, to congratulate him when the party performed well in local elections in 2014.

Delon’s lovers included Schneider and German model-turned-singer Nico, with whom he had a son. In 1964, he married Nathalie Barthelemy and had a second son before ending the marriage and embarking on a 15-year relationship with Mireille Darc. He had two more children with Dutch model Rosalie van Breemen.

In a January 2018 interview, Delon said Parisian competition He had had enough of modern life and had a chapel and tomb built for him on the grounds of his home near Geneva, and for his Belgian Shepherd dog, Loubo.

“If I die before him, I’ll ask the vet if we can go together. He’ll give the dog an injection so he can die in my arms.”

Delon’s last major public appearance was when he received a Palme d’Honor at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2019.

In his final years, Delon was at the centre of a family feud over his care, which made headlines in the French media.

In April 2024, a judge placed Delon under “enhanced conservatorship,” meaning he no longer had full freedom to manage his assets. He was already under legal protection due to concerns about his health and well-being.