Alain Delon, Seductive Star of European Cinema, Dies at 88

 Dubbed "the male Brigitte Bardot," the French actor starred in 'The Leopard,' 'Le Samouraï,' 'The Red Circle' and as Tom Ripley in 'Purple Noon.'

Alain Delon, the dark and dashing leading man from France who starred in some of the greatest European films of the 1960s and ’70s, has died. He was 88.

“Alain Fabien, Anouchka, Anthony, as well as (his dog) Loubo, are deeply saddened to announce the passing of their father. He passed away peacefully in his home in Douchy, surrounded by his three children and his family,” a statement from the family released to AFP news agency said.

With a filmography boasting such titles as Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and The Leopard (1963), René Clément’s Purple Noon (1960), Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Eclipse (1962), Joseph Losey’s Mr. Klein (1976) and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967) and The Red Circle (1970), Delon graced several art house movies now considered classics.

His tense and stoical performances, often as seductive men filled with inner turmoil, were marked by sudden outbursts of violence and emotion as well as an underlying ennui characteristic of French and Italian movies in the postwar era. He was often dubbed “the male Brigitte Bardot.”

Although he was a matinee idol in Europe, Delon never managed to become a star in Hollywood. He moved there in 1964, signing contracts with MGM and Columbia and making a total of six movies. But he failed to break through and left in 1967, soon to star in the crime flicks The Sicilian Clan (1969) and Borsalino (1970), both box office hits in France.

With roughly 100 features to his name, several dozen that he also produced, Delon nonetheless received few awards in his lifetime. He won the French César only once, for Bertrand Blier’s 1984 romance Our Story, in which he played an alcoholic who falls for a younger woman (Nathalie Baye). In 1995, he was given an honorary Golden Bear at the Berlinale and in 2019 an honorary Palme d’or at Cannes.

The latter prize was marked by controversy, with a petition garnering more than 25,000 signatures protesting his “racism, homophobia and misogyny.” (Delon told Reuters he wasn’t against gay marriage but did not approve of “adoption by two people of the same sex” and that he “never harassed a woman in my life. They, however, harassed me a lot.”)

“You don’t have to agree with me,” the teary-eyed actor said to the audience during his Cannes ceremony. “But if there’s one thing in this world that I’m sure of, that I’m really proud of — one thing — it’s my career.”

Delon was born on Nov. 8, 1935, in Sceaux, a suburb in the south of Paris. His father, Fabien, ran a neighborhood movie house, and his mother, Édith, worked at a pharmacy. After his parents divorced in 1939, he was sent to live with a foster family and then to a Catholic boarding school. He received a vocational degree and worked briefly at the butcher shop his stepfather owned in the Paris suburb of Bourg-la-Reine.

Delon settled back in Paris in 1956, working odd jobs and frequenting the clubs and cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, when he met Jean-Claude Brialy, who starred in such early New Wave movies as Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge. Brialy took Delon with him to Cannes that year, and his angel-face looks caught the eye of David O. Selznick. Delon traveled to Rome to do a screen test for the Gone With the Wind producer, who offered him a seven-year contract provided he improved his English.

Instead, Delon chose to remain in France at the behest of director Yves Allégret, who gave him his first feature role in the 1957 revenge thriller Send a Woman When the Devil Fails. (It was Allégret’s wife, actress Michèle Cordoue, who recommended him for the part — Delon was her lover at the time.)

In a 2018 interview with Le Figaro, Delon stressed that he was not a “thespian.”

“My career has nothing to do with the profession of a thespian,” he said. “Being a thespian is a vocation. I’m an actor … A thespian performs, spends years learning his craft, while an actor lives. I always lived my roles and never performed them. An actor is an accident. I’m an accident. My life is an accident. My career is an accident.”