It is an overused phrase, but the death of French screen legend Alain Delon at the age of 88 is genuinely the end of an era. He made his film debut in 1957’s Send A Woman When The Devil Fails (Quand la femme s’en mêle) under the direction of noir stalwart Yves Allégret and his last role came in 2019. The only figure left to match him is Sir Michael Caine, as characteristically English as Delon was unmistakably French, and perhaps Eva Marie Saint. But they are reminders of a nearly vanished world.
Delon was born in Sceaux, one of Paris’s wealthier suburbs, in 1935 to an impeccably petit-bourgeois family. He was lucky in his age. Too young to be involved directly in the Second World War, though he was placed with a foster family after his parents divorced and lived next to Fresnes Prison where the paterfamilias was a guard: the young Alain heard the shots of the firing squad which executed Pierre Laval, prime minister of Vichy France, in October 1945 and remained haunted by the recollection.
Bored, rootless and disruptive at school, Delon was expelled from several institutions and at 17 he joined the French Navy but found himself firmly on land in French Indochina as the colony collapsed under pressure from communist insurgents. He fought at the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ in 1954, the defeat which symbolised France’s colonial failure in the Far East, and was then stationed in the capital, Saigon, but his rebellious nature kept asserting itself. After stealing and crashing a jeep, he was discharged by the Navy and celebrated his 20th birthday in a military prison. Somehow, though, the punitive experience transformed him, instilling him with an admiration for military discipline and a deep sense of patriotism.
He returned to France in 1956, and everything changed. Delon moved to Paris, first working as a longshoreman at Les Halles and then as a waiter in a café near the Champs-Élysées; the jobs may have been menial, but the milieu was everything. He spent his time in the Bohemian enclaves of Pigalle and Montmartre, immersed in an existence divided between showbusiness and the City of Light’s underworld. The latter fascinated him, with its peculiar but rigid code of honour, comradeship and a kind of mutual trust, but he was made for the former.
At 20, Delon was sleekly handsome, dark-haired and crackling with an energy which could be interpreted as menace. Around him and intersecting the artistic company he kept, a new movement in French cinema was emerging which would flower into the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave. Its restless energy and disregard for tradition, articulated in François Truffaut’s 1954 essay Une certain tendance du cinéma français, matched Delon’s turbulent upbringing and nature. Not long after his birthday, at the famous jazz venue the Club Saint-Germain, he had met actress Brigitte Auber, who had recently played a role in Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch A Thief, and they began living together in the 7th arrondissement. It was a critical point for Delon: his new home drew him away from his friends in the French capital’s criminal underworld, and Auger was an entrée into the higher ranks of the film industry. A die had been cast.
In May 1957, Delon accompanied Auger to the Cannes Film Festival, the most glamorous and prestigious international event in the movie industry’s calendar. Staying at her house in the mediaeval town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, a favoured haunt of Picasso, Chagall and Sartre, he was suddenly hugger-mugger with powerful players and major names. He befriended rising French cinema ‘New Wave’ star Jean-Claude Brialy, and caught the eye of his future agent Georges Beaume as well as Henry Willson, talent-spotter for producer David O. Selznick. “Everybody in Cannes stared at the boy,” Beaume recalled, while Willson invited Delon to Rome for a screen test, after which Selznick offered him a seven-year contract on the condition he learned English.
Acting is a profession in which most aspirants spend a lifetime waiting for a break that never comes, but sometimes there are opportunities everywhere. Back in Paris and beginning to learn English, Delon had begun an affair with actress Michèle Cordoue, and she persuaded her husband Yves Allégret to hire her young lover for his next film. Delon played the minor role of Jo in Send A Woman When The Devil Fails, but it was a transformative learning experience.
“I didn’t know how to do anything. Allégret looked at me like that and he said: ‘Listen to me, Alain. Speak as you speak to me. Look at how you look at me. Listen as you listen to me. Don’t play, live.’ It changed everything. If Yves Allégret hadn’t told me that, I wouldn’t have had this career.”
It was advice straight from Truffaut’s manifesto, but it was also perfectly suited to Delon’s character and inclination; indeed, it summed up the reason he would burst onto the stage of New Wave cinema with such success. Coldly handsome, he was naturalistic through lack of training, yet possessed an innate gift for moral ambivalence, always reminding audiences how fine the line really was between silky charm and savage menace.
Although his role in Send A Woman… was minor, it was catalysing: the following year he was cast as a gangster in Be Beautiful But Shut Up (Sois belle et tais-toi), directed by Allégret’s elder brother Marc, then he won his first leading role as a young Austrian army officer in Pierre Gaspard-Huit’s period drama Christine. Playing opposite him was Romy Schneider, barely out of her teens but already with more than ten feature films under her belt and one of Europe’s most popular actresses. She had found fame as the young Empress Elisabeth of Austria in Ernst Marischka’s hugely successful Sissi trilogy of biopics (1955-57) and was the perfect match for Delon’s burgeoning stardom (off-screen too: the pair fell in love while shooting and Schneider left West Germany to live with him in Paris before they announced their engagement the following year).
The decade or so which followed Christine was Delon’s best, his critical and commercial pomp. The Franco-Italian comedy Women Are Weak (Faibles Femmes) of 1959 was released in the United States, and while the New York Times was dismissive, Bosley Crowther’s review unwittingly caught a major element of Delon’s screen magnetism.
“This young man, whom some genius press agent has helpfully tagged ‘the French James Dean,’ has long, silky hair, high cheekbones and a loose-jointed, soigné air. In close-ups (of which there are many), he smiles come-hitherly and generally is condescending towards the lovelies, who simply flip for him. He rides a motorcycle and affects the hauteur of a ‘cat.’ Under Michel Boisrond’s intense direction, he is intensely the focus of the show.”
Précisément, the promoters might reasonably have responded.
The Talented Monsieur Delon
Crowther was won round soon enough. In 1960, Delon starred in two films. Purple Noon (Plein soleil) was adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr Ripley, and Delon’s casting as the charming, eager-to-please Tom Ripley, hiding a ruthless desire to win and a willingness to do anything to further his own interests, was perfect: again, that ability to turn on a sixpence, from seductive to deadly, tender to brutal, without breaking step. Highsmith’s novel chimed with the New Wave’s rejection of conventional morality, and Delon possessed that unpredictability, that frisson of danger that made Ripley so magnetic. In 1996, Martin Scorsese, an ardent fan, restored and re-released the film with Miramax Zoe.
Delon’s second major work that year was Rocco and His Brothers, directed by Luchino Visconti. He played a poor young man from Lucania, in the south of Italy, who travels to industrial Milan with his mother and three brothers after the death of their father and is forced rapidly to become the family’s protector. He eventually finds success as a professional boxer, a way out of the poverty which has accompanied them from their rural origins to urban penury.
Rocco and His Brothers is an important film not just for Delon but for Italian culture; released only months before the centenary of Italy’s unification, it showed a country still deeply divided and parochial, and Crowther compared it favourably to John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath. The film was, he concluded, “garlanded with laurels that are quite as appropriate in this context as they are richly deserved”, and Delon was “touchingly pliant and expressive”.
It was in this decade that Delon would play his most vivid roles and work with some of the best actors and directors European cinema had to offer. Directed again by Boisrand in a strange anthology called Famous Love Affairs (1961), he played Albert III of Bavaria alongside Brigitte Bardot, with other segments of the film featuring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Simone Signoret, Annie Girardot and Pierre Vaneck. L’Eclisse (1962) saw him opposite Monica Vitti and under the direction of Michelangelo Antonioni. He worked with Anthony Asquith on The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), penned by Terence Rattigan, and with Louis Malle in 1968’s Spirits of the Dead (Histoires extraordinaires).
There were two masterpieces of this era. In 1963, he was cast alongside Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale in Visconti’s The Leopard (Il Gattopardo). It was adapted from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s mesmerising, posthumously published novel of 1958, set during the tumultuous years of the Risorgimento and centred on the aristocratic Sicilian Salina family, headed by Don Fabrizio (Lancaster). Delon played Don Fabrizio’s dashing nephew, Prince Tancredi Falconeri, whose romantic and impulsive nature makes him side with the rebel Garibaldi and then with the new King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel II.
The older man is the embodiment of the old order adapting, however reluctantly, to new circumstances, uttering Lampedusa’s most famous line, “Things will have to change in order that they remain the same” (in the novel: “Cambiare tutto perché niente cambi”). But Delon is pitch-perfect as the spirit of the new, a young aristocrat seduced above all by excitement, by change, even if it challenges his own social and economic position. He sums up every contradiction: glamour, enthusiasm, hot-headedness and inconstancy, but, as Lancaster’s character recognises, yes, he is the future of the new Italy.
The other stand-out performance of the 1960s by Delon was as writer Jean-Paul Leroy in Jacques Deray’s beautiful, dark, stifling psychological thriller The Swimming Pool (La Piscine) (1969). Playing opposite his former partner Romy Schneider as Leroy’s girlfriend Marianne, Delon puts in a broodingly multi-layered performance as a unhappy, alcoholic writer who slips seamlessly across the line of murder when he drowns a friend in the eponymous swimming pool. Reviewing the film in 2011, The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw wrote that “Erotic languor turns gradually into fear and then horror in this gripping and superbly controlled psychological thriller”. It is a film utterly of its time, of the souring of the 1960s and the death of idealism, and again it is Delon’s impossible Gallic glamour combined with a dark, amoral core which makes him so compelling.
By the beginning of the 1970s, the logical step for Delon was to establish himself in Hollywood. He played the Spanish communist killer Frank Jacson opposite Richard Burton in the title role of The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), but the film was compared harshly and poorly to director Joseph Losey’s stifling, shimmering masterpiece of the previous year, The Go-Between. However, Red Sun, a spaghetti Western directed by Terence Young and co-starring Charles Bronson, Toshirō Mifune and Ursula Andress, performed rather better.
Scorpio (1973), a Michael Winner spy thriller which reunited Delon with The Leopard co-star Burt Lancaster and saw the Frenchman play the lead role of a CIA hitman, even had the co-operation of the Central Intelligence Agency itself and was partially filmed at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia. But it was a critical failure, dismissed as the kind of run-of-the-mill violence expected from Winner; even Lancaster said later the film was “nothing incisive, just a lot of action”, and called it “one of those things you do as part of your living, but you try to avoid doing them as much as you can”.
Delon did not fit the Hollywood mould. Perhaps he was too good-looking, or too ambiguous: not only was there his ability to shift from charm to menace with frightening speed; when he had been challenged after the making of La Piscine about rumours of homosexuality, he had been casually dismissive. “So what’s wrong if I had? Or I did? Would I be guilty of something? If I like it I’ll do it,” he told a journalist.
By the end of the 1970s, he still professed to seek mainstream Anglophone stardom, but a headline in The Washington Post in January 1979 perhaps illustrated the lack of mutual appreciation or understanding: Vernon Scott’s profile was titled “Alain Delon, France’s Answer to Clint Eastwood”. The comparison was absurd but illustrative. If Eastwood was what Hollywood was looking for, Delon was not the answer.
His last tilt at the American market was in 1979’s starry disaster movie The Concorde… Airport ’79. The fourth and final instalment of the Airport franchise, it showed a series running out of creative steam. Delon played Captain Paul Metrand, and shared the screen with heavyweights George Kennedy, Susan Blakely and Robert Wagner. The film was a reasonably commercial success in Europe but in the United States, which for Delon had been the whole point, it was a commercial and a critical flop, losing money and receiving savage reviews. It would feature in Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert’s 2000 book I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie.
If he was not to be a Hollywood star, Delon would nonetheless remain active almost until the end of his life. He worked throughout the 1970s and 1980s, producing some fine performances, before announcing his retirement in 1997. It was not wholehearted, though, and he continued to accept roles now and again, and in 2001 he scored a significant success with French television drama Fabio Montale, in which he played an ageing but stylish policeman. His final television work was in 2011 and his last film role came in 2019.
Delon, like many French artists, did not restrict himself to film and television. In 1973, he scored an international hit and a number one in France when he duetted with French-Italian singer Dalida on “Paroles, paroles”, and 10 years later performed with Shirley Bassey on “Thought I’d Ring You”. As late as 2019, at the age of 83, he released a single entitled “Je n’aime que toi”, written by Rick Allison and Julia Paris.
His personal life was always turbulent. His bodyguard, Stefan Marković, was killed in 1968 and a scandal blossomed which included sex parties and the future president of France, Georges Pompidou. In 1969, he was convicted by an Italian court of assaulting a photographer. There were difficult relationships with his children, and at one point he expressed some sympathy for the far-right National Front. In truth, the darkness he could summon up so readily on screen was not wholly imagined or false: there was a dangerous element to Delon’s character which had been present since his teenage years.
When Delon received an honorary Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019, there was considerable controversy because of his relationships with women, his occasional political views and remarks he had made over the years about homosexuals and same-sex couples. The festival’s artistic director, Thierry Frémaux, address the criticisms in a speech in honour of Delon: “We’re not giving Alain Delon the Nobel Peace Prize,” he argued in frustration. “We’re giving him a Palme d’Or for his career as an actor.”
“We know that intolerance is back,” Frémaux said. “We’re being asked to believe that if we all think the same, it will protect us from the risk of being disliked or being wrong. But Alain Delon is not afraid of being wrong, being disliked, and he doesn’t think like others, and he’s not afraid of being alone.”
Delon’s career was never likely to be marked with quiet, murmured appreciation. He was too spiky, too self-assured, too disruptive and too wilful for that. Frémaux had a point: he was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Whether it is possible to separate the personality of an actor from his performances is for everyone to judge individually. Nor was Delon universally good as a film actor, nor universally successful. Inevitably with such a long career and so many performances, there were some which were mediocre and some which were genuinely bad.
Nevertheless, Alain Delon embodied something characteristically French and absolutely of its time, from the New Wave of the mid-1950s to the souring of the 1960s amid disappointment and discontent. For that period, he was resplendent, dazzling, magnetic: overflowing with Gallic charm and outrageous good looks but carrying just beneath the surface a streak of menace and danger. He was never going to be a Hollywood star, he was far too French.
His death comes at the end of a long life, not necessarily always well-lived, but it marks something profound too. It cuts one of our final connections with a lost world of glamour, sheen and confidence, one in which anything was possible, because why not? Things will have to change in order that they stay the same? No. They have changed, changed utterly. But we can still look back and wonder at what they were like.
Image top : Alain Delon, in the French movie ”Adieu L’Ami” 1968, Credit: John Irving – https://www.flickr.com/photos/62100938@N02/6227265743
