Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon (8 November 1935 - 18 August 2024) was a French actor.
He became renowned for his work during the French New Wave, with his many collaborations with some great European directors, including Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Pierre Melville, and even, for one film, Jean-Luc Godard.
Delon's best known works include L'eclisse (directed by Antonioni), Le Samouraï (directed by Melville), and Purple Noon (Plein Soleil) in which he played Tom Ripley. Patricia Highsmith, creator of the Ripliad, was a big fan of his performance. He took a stab at Hollywood stardom in the mid-late 1960s, but most of his American films did poorly, and he returned to Europe where he enjoyed a series of hits in local productions into the 1980s.
Delon was a prominent sex symbol during The '60s, considered to be incredibly good-looking. He had a prominent real-life romance with actress Romy Schneider with whom he made several films. He also had a relationship with Nico which resulted in the birth of Ari (1962-2023), whom Alain never acknowledged as his son, despite the boy being his spitting image. Delon also married his co-star on Le Samouraï Nathalie Barthélémy (born Francine Canovas, who would later go on as Nathalie Delon) only for that to end in divorce. Three of his children — Anthony Delon, Anouchka Delon, and Alain-Fabien Delon — became actors.
Trivia: Hong Kong actor Ti Lung took his stage name from Delon.
Selected filmography:
- Christine (1958) as Franz Lobheiner
- Purple Noon (1960) as Tom Ripley
- Rocco and His Brothers (1960) as Rocco Parondi
- L'eclisse (1962) as Piero
- The Black Tulip as Guillaume de Saint Preux / Julien de Saint Preux / The Black Tulip (1963 film version of a novel).
- The Leopard as Prince Tancredi Falconeri (1963)
- Any Number Can Win as Francis Verlot (1963)
- Once a Thief as Eddie Pedak (1965)
- The Yellow Rolls-Royce as Stefano (1965)
- Texas Across the River as Don Andrea Baldazar (1966)
- Is Paris Burning? as Jacques Chaban-Delmas (1966)
- Le Samouraï as Jef Costello (1967)
- Spirits of the Dead as William Wilson (1968)
- La Piscine as Jean-Paul Leroy (1969)
- Le Cercle rouge as Corey (1970)
- Borsalino as Roch Siffredi (1970)
- Borsalino & Co. (1974)
- Red Sun as Gauche (1971)
- Un Flic as Commissaire Édouard Coleman (1972)
- Scorpio as Jean Laurier / Scorpio (1973)
- Shock Treatment as Doctor Devilers (1973)
- Zorro as Don Diego de la Vega / Zorro (1975)
- Nouvelle Vague as Lui / Roger Lennox / Richard Lennox (1990)
- Half a Chance as Julien Vignal (1998)
- Asterix at the Olympic Games as Julius Caesar (2008)
Tropes
- Approval of God: Patricia Highsmith loved Delon's portrayal of Tom Ripley in Purple Noon, even though she didn't like the change to the ending.
- Japandering: He was very popular in Japan at some point, and appeared in Mazda car ads there.
- Real-Life Relative: He played in two films with his then-lover Romy Schneider, Christine (1958) and Purple Noon (1960). In 1969, he co-starred with her again in La Piscine, but they were not in a relationship anymore by that time.
- Romance on the Set: Happened with Romy Schneider during the filming of Christine (1958). It didn't start the best of ways, they loathed each other at first, but they eventually warmed up to each other.
- So My Kids Can Watch: Another reason Delon accepted to star in 1975's Zorro besides wanting to star in another swashbuckler film after 1964's The Black Tulip was that his son Anthony was a fan of the Guy Williams series.
- Spoken Word in Music: He provided spoken words as the unlucky suitor in Dalida's song "Paroles, Paroles" ("Words, Words").
- Those Two Actors:
- Played alongside his longtime friend and fellow superstar Jean-Paul Belmondo in Sois belle et tais-toi, Les Amours célèbres, Is Paris Burning?, Ho!, Borsalino and Half a Chance.
- He also played alongside Jean Gabin in several films, as a sort of passing of the torch from the older generation of French leading man to the then-new one Delon embodied.
- What Could Have Been: He was proposed roles in Viva Maria!, Last Tango in Paris (it was him who suggested Bernardo Bertolucci to hire Marlon Brando instead), The Godfather, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Johnnie To's Vengeance and Sofia Coppola's Marie-Antoinette. He refused them all. In the case of Marie-Antoinette, it was because he was opposed to an American director making a film about The French Revolution, being a quite conservative Frenchman.