French film legend Alain Delon has died ‘very early in the middle of the night’, aged 88, surrounded by his family and children.
The actor had been in poor health since suffering a stroke in 2019, rarely leaving his estate in Douchy, in France‘s Val de Loire region.
Delon’s legend was launched in 1960, playing pretty boy killers and mysterious schemers in ‘Purple Noon’ – later remade as ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’ – and Luchino Visconti’s ‘The Leopard’.
A rarity on the screen since the 1990s, Delon made headlines in 2023 when his three children filed a complaint against his live-in assistant Hiromi Rollin, accusing her of harassment and threatening behaviour.
His three children went on to wage a public battle in the media and the courts, arguing over the star’s state of health.
In May 2019, he made his last major public appearance on the red carpet to receive an honorary Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
French film legend Alain Delon (pictured in May 2013) has died, aged 88, surrounded by his family and friends
His children announced his death on Sunday morning in a statement to French national news agency Agence France-Presse, a common practice in France.
‘Alain Fabien, Anouchka, Anthony, as well as (his dog) Loubo, are deeply saddened to announce the passing of their father,’ the statement said.
‘He passed away peacefully in his home in Douchy, surrounded by his three children and his family.’ The family has asked for privacy.
Tributes to Delon immediately started pouring in on social platforms, and all leading French media switched to full-fledged coverage of his rich career.
To some, Delon was the sexiest man of the 20th century who played the impeccably tailored, ice-cold killers popularised by 1960s New Wave films to perfection.
To others, the man who often referred to himself in the third person and admitted to having slapped a woman, was an egotistical chauvinist, with feminists appalled by the lifetime achievement award the Cannes film festival gave him in 2019.
His millions of fans, from France to Japan – where Delon was adored as an idol of male beauty – were prepared to overlook his failings.
The whiff of sulphur and his angelic face also proved an irresistible combination to a long line of glamorous actresses who fell for him.
In a note to Delon on his 80th birthday, one of his oldest friends, fellow 1960s icon Brigitte Bardot, called him ‘an eagle with two heads… the best and the worst.’
French actor Alain Delon on the set of the 1964 film The Yellow Rolls-Royce directed by British Anthony Asquith
French actor Alain Delon (R) kisses his wife Nathalie upon his arrival at Orly airport in Orly, France, on April 28, 1965
With striking blue eyes, Delon was sometimes referred to as the ‘French Frank Sinatra’ for his handsome looks, a comparison the actor disliked.
Unlike Sinatra, who always denied connections with the Mafia, Delon openly acknowledged his shady pals in the underworld.
In a 1970 interview with the New York Times, Delon was asked about such acquaintances, one of whom was among the last ‘Godfathers’ of the underworld in the Mediterranean port of Marseille.
‘Most of them the gangsters I know … were my friends before I became an actor,’ he said. ‘I don’t worry about what a friend does. Each is responsible for his own act. It doesn’t matter what he does.’
Delon shot to fame in two films by Italian director Luchino Visconti, ‘Rocco and His Brothers’ in 1960 and ‘The Leopard’ in 1963.
He then set the template for one of Hollywood’s favourite tropes – the mysterious, cerebral hitman – with his staggering performance as the silent killer in Jean-Pierre Melville’s ‘Le Samurai’ (1967).
Directors from Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino to Hong Kong‘s John Woo all acknowledge a debt to the inner life Delon gave his stylish killer.
Film historian Jean-Michel Frodon also said no other French male actor in the last half century ‘had the same screen presence’ as Delon.
French actor Vincent Lindon, who won the best actor award at Cannes in 2015, described Delon’s looks as ‘ hypnotising’, telling AFP: ‘You can look at photos of him for hours and hours.’
French actor Alain Delon (R) and actress Mireille Darc (L) at Orly airport in Orly, France in November 1969
Born just outside Paris on November 8, 1935, Delon started life on the back foot: he was put in foster care aged four after his parents divorced.
He ran away from home at least once and was expelled several times from boarding schools before joining the Marines at 17.
As a teenage soldier he fought to keep Indochina French before being dishonourably discharged for stealing a jeep.
Back in France in the mid-50s, he worked as a porter at Paris wholesale food market, Les Halles, and spent time in the red-light Pigalle district before migrating to the cafes of the bohemian St. Germain des Pres area.
There he met French actor Jean-Claude Brialy, who took him to the Cannes Film Festival, where he attracted the attention of an American talent scout who arranged a screen test.
He made his film debut in 1957 in ‘Quand la femme s’en mele’ (‘Send a Woman When the Devil Fails’).
Delon was a businessman as well as an actor, leveraging his looks to sell branded cosmetics and dabbling in race-horses with old underworld friends.
He invested in a racehorse stable with Jacky ‘Le Mat’ Imbert, a notorious figure in a thriving Marseille crime scene.
French actors Alain Delon (R) and Anne Parillaud (L) give an interview, on September 9, 1981 during a broadcast news on French TV TF1 in Paris
French actor Alain Delon (C) accompanied by French actress Mireille Darc (L) walk on June 12, 1980 before the practice session for the 48th edition of the 24 hours of Le Mans, on the circuit de la Sarthe in Le Mans, western France
Delon’s complicated private life and louche friendships kept him in the headlines.
He was arrested in 1968 after his former bodyguard, a young Yugoslav called Stefan Markovic, was found dead in a bag, with a bullet in his head, discarded in a rubbish dump near Paris.
Police had suspected Markovic of having an affair with Delon’s wife Nathalie in a case that captured the nation’s attention.
The actor was interrogated and cleared by police but the ‘Markovic Affair’ snowballed into a national scandal.
Police charged Francois Marcantoni, a Corsican gangster friend of Delon’s, with the Markovic murder. He spent a year in prison charged with the killing before being acquitted and released. The case was eventually dropped, unsolved.
Delon was outspoken off-stage and courted controversy when he did so – notably when he said he regretted the abolition of the death penalty and spoke disparagingly of gay marriage, which was legalised in France in 2013.
He publicly defended the far-right National Front and telephoned its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, an old friend, to congratulate him when the party did well in local elections in 2014.
French actors Nathalie Delon and Alain Delon give a press conference for the release of their film ‘Easy Down There’ (Doucement les Basses), on April 7, 1971 in Lyon
Romy Schneider (L) kisses Italian director Luchino Visconti on March 30, 1961 next to Magda Schneider (2nd R), French actor Alain Delon and his mother Edith Arnold (2nd L), at the Paris theatre, where they played ”Tis Pity She’s a Whore’
Delon became a star in France and was idolised by men and women in Japan, but never made it as big in Hollywood despite performing with American cinema giants, including Burt Lancaster when the Frenchman played apprentice-hitman Scorpio in the eponymous 1973 film.
In the 1970 film ‘Borsalino’, he starred with fellow French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, playing gangsters who come to blows in an unforgettable, stylised fight over a woman.
Crowning moments also included 1969 erotic thriller ‘La Piscine’ (‘The Swimming Pool’), where Delon paired up with real-life lover Romy Schneider, in a sultry French Riviera saga of jealously and seduction.
Delon’s lovers included German actress Romy Schneider and German model-turned-singer Nico.
His many romances ended in heartbreak and tragedy, including in the case of his long and stormy relationship with Schneider, with whom he starred in ‘The Swimming Pool’ (1969).
‘The love of my life’ – as Delon repeatedly called her – was found dead at her home at the age of 43, less than a year after her son was killed in a freak accident, impaled on a railing. The official cause of death was cardiac arrest.
In 1964, he married Nathalie Barthelemy and fathered a second son before ending the marriage and embarking on a 15-year relationship with Mireille Darc. He had two more children with Dutch model Rosalie van Breemen.
While living his ‘great passion’ with Schneider, Delon reportedly fathered a son with her compatriot, the Velvet Underground singer Nico.
He always denied the child was his, yet Delon’s mother brought up the boy, Ari Boulogne, who bore a striking resemblance to Delon and insisted he was his son until his death in 2023, aged 60, from a heroin overdose.
‘I was programmed for success, not happiness. The two don’t go together,’ said Delon, who claimed to have always defined himself through women.
‘It’s in them, through the look in the eyes of my first wife, Nathalie, from Romy, (actress and longtime partner) Mireille (Darc), or the mother of my children (Rosalie van Breemen), that I drew the motivation to be who I am,’ he said.
Yet two of his sons accused him of domestic violence, with one saying Delon had broken eight of his mother’s ribs and her nose twice.
Delon denied this but admitted to slapping women who attacked him.
Austrian actress Romy Schneider dances with actor Alain Delon, on March 20, 1959 during an actors’ ball in Munich
Alain Delon (R), his wife French actress Mireille Darc and Georges Cravenne, leave Paris Opera House on October 15, 1968 after viewing la premiere of a ballet of French choreograper Roland Petit, starring Rudolf Nureev and Marie Bell
Delon effectively quit film around 2000, appearing mostly on television afterwards though he was tempted back to the big screen to play Julius Caesar in an Asterix film in 2008.
In later years, he became a polarising figure over his support for the far-right National Front (later renamed the National Rally), whose founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, he called a ‘dear friend’.
He stirred further controversy in 2016 by jumping to the defence of ex-minister Nadine Morano who declared France a ‘white race country’ that she didn’t want to see become Muslim.
‘She has the balls to say it,’ Delon said. ‘I take off my hat to her. I don’t give a s**t, I say what I think and I will continue to do so.’
In a January 2018 interview, Delon told Paris Match he was fed up with modern life and had a chapel and tomb ready for him on the grounds of his home near Geneva, and for his Belgian shepherd dog, called Loubo.
‘If I die before him I’ll ask the vet to let us go together. He will give the dog an injection so he can die in my arms.’
Delon’s last major public appearance was to receive an honorary Palme d’or at the Cannes film festival in May 2019.
In June 2019, he suffered a debilitating stroke and rarely left his estate in the central Loiret region of France thereafter.
As he became weaker, his three children engaged in open warfare over his estate.
The three – Anthony, Anouchka and Alain-Fabien – first filed a complaint accusing his Japanese companion and former carer, Hiromi Rollin, of trying to take advantage of their father.
When that case was thrown out they turned on each other in January 2024, with Anthony accusing Anouchka, the favourite child, of preying on their ‘weakened’ father.
Delon said through a lawyer he would report his son to the police.
In April 2024 a judge placed Delon under ‘reinforced curatorship’, meaning he no longer had full freedom to manage his assets. He was already under legal protection over concerns over his health and well-being.
This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates.