French Star of ‘Le Samourai’ Was 88

Alain Delon, the French actor most famous for his roles in the films of New Wave director Jean-Pierre Melville, especially “Le Samourai,” has died. He was 88. 

“He passed away peacefully in his home in Douchy, surrounded by his three children and his family,” according to a statement released to the AFP news agency by his family.

In addition to “Le Samourai,” Delon also appeared in Melville’s brilliant heist film “Le Cercle rouge” and “Un Flic.”

Some of his other significant films were Rene Clement’s “Purple Noon”; Visconti’s “Rocco and His Brothers” and “The Leopard”; Antonioni’s “L’Eclisse”; Jose Giovanni’s “Two Men in Town”; and Joseph Losey’s “Mr. Klein.”

After Jean-Paul Belmondo defined French cool at the beginning of the New Wave in Godard’s “Breathless,” Delon and director Melville very consciously redefined it in “Le Samourai,” in which he played a killer for hire always adjusting his fedora so it was just so, and the actor was consequently compared to James Dean.

But the comparison to Dean was limited; while the American actor was given to emotional outbursts in his performances, Delon was far from effusive. What was taken for cool in “Le Samourai” could just seem cold in a lesser movie, such as Melville’s “Un Flic.”

Nevertheless it is hard for Americans to understand the extent of Delon’s fame during the 1960s and ’70s not just in France but in regions as diverse as Japan, Communist China (where a 1975 version of “Zorro” starring Delon as the popular hero was one of the first Western movies exhibited in the country after the Cultural Revolution) and Latin America.

Delon’s extraordinary appeal was crystallized in “Le Samourai.” Film scholar David Thomson described him as “the enigmatic angel of French film, only 32 in 1967, and nearly feminine. Yet so earnest and immaculate as to be thought lethal or potent. He was also close by then to the real French underworld.” Thomson added: “Delon is not so much a good actor as an astonishing presence — no wonder he was so thrilled to realize that the thing Melville most required was his willingness to be photographed.”

 Roger Ebert called Delon the “tough pretty boy of French movies, an actor so improbably handsome that his best strategy for dealing with his looks was to use a poker face.”

In “Le Samourai” Melville meticulously follows Delon’s assassin Jef Costello as he creates an alibi, knocks off the owner of a nightclub, makes it through a police lineup, finds that those who hired him have betrayed him and is hunted by the police. The plot is far, far less important than the style of the movie, the style of Delon’s portrayal of the killer.

Delon’s first major film was Rene Clement’s 1960 “Purple Noon,” an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” with Delon as the sociopath Tom Ripley, who murders his friend and takes his identity. The film made the actor a star. (It was restored in 2012 and screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013 as part of a career retrospective feting the actor.)

In Visconti’s excellent, operatic “Rocco and His Brothers,” also made in 1960, Delon played the title character, part of a poor family who move north to Milan from Southern Italy in search of greater opportunities. His rather passive character reluctantly becomes a boxer to support the family. 

A few years later Delon worked for Visconti again, in the director’s 1963 masterpiece “The Leopard,” in which Burt Lancaster played a 19th century Sicilian prince trying to cope with revolution and what it will mean for his family and his social class. Delon played his dashing nephew, who joins the revolutionaries, then throws in with the king’s army; he had palpable chemistry in the film with the beautiful Claudia Cardinale.

In 1962 Delon starred with Monica Vitti in Antonioni’s “L’Eclisse,” the second entry in the director’s justly famous alienation trilogy. Delon was perfectly cast as a wheeler-dealer stockbroker who becomes involved with Vitti’s character but is unwilling and unable to satisfy her emotional needs.

In 1969 he starred with Romy Schneider and Maurice Ronet in the erotically charged thriller “La Piscine” (The Swimming Pool).

He starred with Richard Burton (who played the title character), Schneider and Valentina Cortese in Joseph Losey’s 1972 “The Assassination of Trotsky” and a few years later worked for Losey in the brilliant “Mr. Klein,” in which Del0n gave a tightly controlled performance as a Catholic art dealer in occupied Paris who takes advantage as rich Jews with art collections are carted away —  but begins to have problems of his own as he is increasingly mistaken for an elusive Jew who is using his name for secret operations. Delon served as one of the producers on the film.

Delon starred in three films with a French superstar of an earlier generation, Jean Gabin: crime dramas “Any Number Can Win” (1963), 1969’s “The Sicilian Clan” and “1973’s “Two Men in Town,” the last of which also sported, in a small role, a young Gerard Depardieu and thus bridged three generations.

Delon also had a supporting role as a photographer following Shirley MacLaine in the 1964 international production “The Yellow Rolls Royce,” starring Rex Harrison and Ingrid Bergman.

The actor was among the large number of French stars (and some American ones, including Kirk Douglas and Glenn Ford) who overpopulated Rene Clement’s confusing story of the final days of the Nazi occupation of the French capital, “Is Paris Burning?” (1966).

In 1971 Delon starred with Charles Bronson, Toshiro Mifune, Ursula Andress and Capucine in the Terence Young-directed international production “Red Sun”; the Western, shot in Spain, was not much liked in the U.S. but enjoyed success in Europe and Asia. (Delon, who developed an interest in Japan as a result of “Le Samourai,” long enjoyed a following in the country, where sunglasses branded with his name were a hit.)

In 1973 Delon reunited with his “The Leopard” co-star Burt Lancaster for the Michael Winner-directed thriller “Scorpio,” in which Delon played an assassin ordered to eliminate Lancaster’s weary spy, who wants out of the game. (Strangely, Winner’s previous film, “The Mechanic,” starring Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent, had almost exactly the same plot.)

Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon was born in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine. His father was of French and Corsican Italian descent, his mother of French and German ancestry. His parents divorced early on, and Delon’s stormy childhood included frequent expulsions from school. After military service in French Indochina, he did odd jobs around Paris, where he encountered actor Jean Claude Brialy, who invited him to the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, where Delon made some professional contacts.

He made his film debut the next year with a small role in Yves Allegret’s “Send a Woman When the Devil Fails.”

While David O. Selznick was in Italy shooting “A Farewell to Arms” in Italy, or perhaps at Cannes, he met Delon and offered him a Hollywood contract provided that the nascent actor learn English, but Delon nixed any such notions, though he did do three American films over the years: 1964 crime drama “Once a Thief” with Ann-Margret and Van Heflin and 1966 Western “Four for Texas” with Dean Martin, plus “Airport ’79: The Concorde,” in which he played the captain of the troubled plane.

During the early 1980s there was a period in which Delon sought a career behind the camera, starting in 1981 with “Pour la peau d’un flic,” which he adapted from a novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette, directed and starred in opposite Anne Parillaud; followed the next year by “Le choc,” on which he and Robin Davis again adapted a Manchette novel and co-directed, though Delon went uncredited, and which starred Delon opposite Catherine Deneuve; and finally 1983’s “Le battant,” on which Delon was among those adapting a novel by André Caroff, directed with Davis (although Davis went uncredited this time) and starred. These films were all in the genre with which the actor was most comfortable and with which he was most associated, crime drama, but they were only adequate efforts.

He adapted several other novels into films during the 1980s and wrote a couple of original screenplays.

More significantly, Delon was a producer on 30 of his films.

He starred as the title character in the French TV crime drama “Frank Riva” in 2003-04  and as Julius Caesar in the 2008 film “Asterix at the Olympic Games.”

At the peak of his career, in 1969, the actor was associated with a scandal that had both criminal and political dimensions. Stevan Markovic, the former bodyguard for Delon and his wife Nathalie (who appeared with him in “Le Samourai”), was murdered — his corpse found in the forest — and investigators found a letter written by Markovic that tied the Delons to a Corsican fighter named François Marcantoni, who was subsequently tied to former French president Georges Pompidou. The Delons were questioned by police over the homicide, and it was unclear how far the scandal would spread; only Marcantoni was convicted.

Delon’s love life was of keen interest to the French media. He had a relationship with German actress Romy Schneider from 1959-64, but he retained an emotional connection to her long thereafter. She ultimately died from a mixture of pain killers and alcohol in 1982. At the Césars in 2008, Delon took to the stage to receive on her behalf an award marking what would have been her 70th birthday and asked the audience to honor her with a standing ovation.

Yet during his relationship with Schneider, he had an affair with Nico (of the Velvet Underground), fathering a son, Ari Boulogne.

He married Nathalie Barthélemy in 1964 and had a son, Anthony. The couple divorced in 1969.

Delon subsequently had a 15-year relationship with French actress Mireille Darc and then one with Dutch model Rosalie van Breemen, with whom he had two children, but split in 2002. 

He was accorded an honorary Palme d’Or in 2019. 

His family placed him under conservatorship in 2024 after he had suffered a stroke in 2019.