French film star Alain Delon dies at age 88

“Alain Fabien, Anouchka, Anthony, and (his dog) Loubo, are deeply saddened to announce the passing of their father. He passed away peacefully at his home in Douchy, surrounded by his three children and his family,” they said in a statement, adding that the family has asked for privacy.

Born in 1935 in Sceaux on the outskirts of Paris, Delon was expelled from several schools before leaving at the age of 14 to work in a butcher’s shop. After a stint in the Navy (where he fought in the French colonial war in Vietnam), he was dishonorably discharged in 1956 and turned to acting. He was spotted by Hollywood producer David O’Selznick at Cannes and signed a contract, but decided to try his luck in French cinema, making his debut with a small role in Yves Allégret’s 1957 thriller Send a Woman When the Devil Fails.

Delon’s intense good looks made an immediate impression, and he quickly graduated to leading roles. In 1958, he was cast opposite Romy Schneider in Christine, as a soldier and a musician’s daughter who fall in love. Delon and Schneider began a high-profile romance in real life off the set, cementing Delon’s growing reputation as a sex symbol.

A big star… Maurice Ronet, Marie Laforet and Alain Delon in Plein Soleil. Photo: Rex/Snap Stills

In 1960, he made two films that had a major international impact: the Patricia Highsmith adaptation Plein Soleil (also known as Purple Noon) and Rocco and His Brothers. The former, a French-language version of The Talented Mr Ripley, made Delon a major star, while Rocco – a saga about a southern Italian farming family moving to the prosperous north – brought him under the spell of Visconti, one of Europe’s leading authors. Another Italian auteur, Antonioni, cast him as a slick stockbroker in 1962’s L’Eclisse. Delon reunited with Visconti in 1963 for The Leopard (also known as Il Gattopardo), a large-scale epic set in the Risorgimento Sicilian, based on the famous Lampedusa novel.

Delon’s international profile was such that he made a serious attempt to break into English-language films, beginning with a small role in the Anthony Asquith-directed anthology comedy The Yellow Rolls-Royce. Delon appeared in Lost Command, about French paratroopers in World War II, Dean Martin in the west Texas Across the River, and Is Paris Burning?, another war epic starring Kirk Douglas. None of these were successful enough in Hollywood to establish him there, however, and Delon returned to France.

Delon in Le Samouraï. Photo: Allstar/Cinetext/New Yorker

In 1967, he made the cult classic Le Samouraï with director Jean-Pierre Melville, in which he played a trenchcoat-wearing hitman; the domestic success of that film ushered in a string of crime films, including The Sicilian Clan with Jean Gabin, the Marseille-set Borsalino directed by Deray, and another Melville classic, The Red Circle. Delon also found time to appear opposite Marianne Faithfull in Girl on a Motorcycle, which sees a leather-clad Faithfull riding a motorbike across Europe, as well as La Piscine, opposite his former lover Schneider – which was remade in 2016 as A Bigger Splash with Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes.

La Piscine also coincided with a major public scandal, the “Markovic Affair”, which reached the highest echelons of France after Delon’s bodyguard Stefan Markovic was found dead in a rubbish dump in 1968. François Marcantoni, a notorious underworld figure and long-time friend of Delon, was charged with the murder, but the charges were eventually dropped. The plot thickened when compromising photographs of Markovic were discovered, allegedly featuring members of the French elite, including the wife of presidential candidate Georges Pompidou. Ultimately, nothing was proven, but Delon’s close ties to a gallery of unsavory characters became public knowledge.

In the 1970s, Delon continued to make films at a steady pace, without the same impact as in previous decades. Monsieur Klein won the César for Best Picture in 1977, in which Delon played an art dealer during World War II whose identity is confused with a Jewish fugitive of the same name; in 1985, he won the César for Best Actor for Bertrand Blier’s surrealist fable Notre Histoire. Delon also ventured in a new direction, producing a series of films with his own company, making his directorial debut in 1981 with Pour la Peau d’un Flic , and promoting boxing and furniture design.

Delon began to slow his output in the 1990s after playing a dual role in Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague. He announced his retirement from acting in 1997, but returned in 2008 to play Julius Caesar in the French live-action hit Asterix at the Olympic Games.

Delon had a complicated personal life, including long-term relationships with Schneider, Mireille Darc (from whom he divorced in 1982 after 15 years together), and Rosalie van Breemen, a Dutch model with whom he had two children and from whom he divorced in 2002. He was married to Nathalie Delon from 1964 to 1968; they had one child, Anthony, in 1964. In 1962, the singer and model Nico gave birth to a son, Christian; Delon denied paternity, but the child was adopted by Delon’s mother.