Alain Delon, the gritty and dashing French leading man who starred in some of the biggest European films of the 1960s and 1970s, has died. He was 88 years old.

“It is with deep sadness that Alain Fabien, Anouchka, Anthony and (his dog) Loubo announce the death of their father. He passed away peacefully in his home in Douchy, surrounded by his three children and his family,” the family said in a statement to AFP news agency.

Delon had suffered from poor health in recent years and suffered a stroke in 2019.

With a filmography that includes titles such as Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and his brothers (1960) and The Leopard (1963), René Cléments Purple Noon (1960), Michelangelo Antonioni The solar eclipse (1962), Joseph Losey’s Mr Klein (1976) and Jean-Pierre Melville’s The Samourai (1967) and The Red Circle (1970), Delon appeared in several arthouse films that are now considered classics.

His tense and stoic performances, often as seductive men full of inner turmoil, were marked by sudden outbursts of violence and emotion, as well as an underlying boredom characteristic of post-war French and Italian films. He was often described as “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, signed contracts with MGM and Columbia, and made a total of six films. But he failed to make the breakthrough and left town in 1967, soon moving into crime films. The Sicilian clan (1969) and Borsalino (1970), both box office hits in France.

Although Delon made around 100 films, of which he also produced several dozen, he received very few awards in his life. He won the French César only once, for Bertrand Blier’s 1984 romance. Our storyin which he plays an alcoholic who falls in love with a younger woman (Nathalie Baye). In 1995 he received an Honorary Golden Bear at the Berlinale and in 2019 an Honorary Palme d’Or in Cannes.

The latter award was marked by controversy, with a petition gathering more than 25,000 signatures protesting against its “racism, homophobia and misogyny.” (Delon told Reuters he was not against gay marriage but against “adoption by two people of the same sex” and that he had “never harassed a woman in my life. However, they harassed me very often.”)

“You don’t have to agree with me,” the actor told the audience with tears in his eyes during his ceremony in Cannes. “But if there is one thing in this world that I am sure of and that I am really proud of – one thing – it is my career.”

Delon was born on November 8, 1935, in Sceaux, a suburb in the south of Paris. His father, Fabien, ran a neighborhood cinema and his mother, Édith, worked in a pharmacy. After his parents divorced in 1939, he was sent to a foster family and then to a Catholic boarding school. He earned a vocational degree and worked briefly in his stepfather’s butcher shop in the Paris suburb of Bourg-la-Reine.

At age 17, Delon was called up for military service and joined the French Navy. He was reprimanded for stealing equipment and sent to Saigon to serve in the First Indochina War, but was discharged for stealing a jeep and causing an accident.

In 1956, Delon settled back in Paris, working odd jobs and frequenting the clubs and cafes of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. There he met Jean-Claude Brialy, who had appeared in early New Wave films, such as Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau SergeBrialy took Delon to Cannes that year and his angelic face caught the attention of David O. Selznick. Delon traveled to Rome to make a screen test for the Gone with the wind Producer who offered him a seven-year contract provided he improved his English.

Instead, Delon decided to stay in France at the behest of director Yves Allégret, who gave him his first film role in the 1957 revenge thriller Send a woman if the devil fails(It was Allégret’s wife, the actress Michèle Cordoue, who recommended him for the role – Delon was her lover at the time.)

“I didn’t know how to do anything,” he said Vanity Fair Years later, about his first experiences in front of the camera as a 22-year-old with no training. “Yves Allégret looked at me and said: ‘Listen to me carefully, Alain: Speak as you speak to me. See how you look at me. Listen as you listen to me. Don’t look, live.’ That changed everything.”

From then on, Delon worked continuously. In 1958, he was cast in the leading role in the French crime comedy Be beautiful and keep your mouth shut in which Jean-Paul Belmondo played an early role as a young gangster (the actors appeared together eight times during their careers). That same year he was also cast as an army lieutenant in the pre-World War I Viennese drama Christine.

In the latter, German actress Romy Schneider (from the popular Sissi films) in the title role, and the romance between her character and Delon on screen developed into a real love affair. The couple became engaged the next year and remained together until 1963. After their separation, they starred in two more films: Jacques Deray’s The swimming pool (1969) and Losey’s The assassination of Trotsky (1972).

Delon’s big breakthrough came in 1960 with Purple Noonadapted by Clément (Forbidden games) from Patricia Highsmith’s book The talented Mr. RipleyAs seductive antihero Tom Ripley, Delon exuded charisma and malice in a thriller set against a stunning Mediterranean backdrop. The film was a critical and box office success, with some critics calling Delon “the new James Dean.”

The actor followed with Visconti’s sprawling family drama Rocco and his brothersplays an impoverished southern Italian who moves to Milan with his siblings and trains to become a boxing champion. With Renato Salvatori and Annie Girardot in the other leading roles. Rocco won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1960 and cemented Delon’s reputation in Europe and abroad. It was only the fifth feature film of his career.

Other highlights of the 1960s were Antonioni’s modernist existential romance The solar eclipsein which he played alongside Monica Vitti; Henri Verneuil’s melancholic gangster film Any number can win (1963), in which he played an ambitious young gangster alongside French legend Jean Gabin; and Visconti’s epic Sicilian masterpiece The Leopardwith Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1963 and earned Delon his only Golden Globe nomination.

His other works throughout the decade include several notable works: Alain Cavalier’s dark noir The Undefeated (1964), which Delon also produced; the saga about the Second World War Is Paris burning? (1966), which reunited him with Clément and featured a star-studded international cast including Orson Welles, Leslie Caron and Kirk Douglas; Deray’s sexy three-person drama The swimming pool (remade as A bigger splash in 2015), with Schneider and Jane Birkin; and Verneuil’s hit The Sicilian clan (1969), a fast-paced French-Italian crime thriller with Lino Ventura in another leading role.

In Hollywood, Delon The yellow Rolls-Royce (1964) with Shirley MacLaine; the thriller Once a thief (1965) with Ann-Margret and Jack Palance; with Dean Martin in the leading roles Texas across the river (1966); and the Algerian war film Lost Command (1966), with Anthony Quinn.

Another major role in the 1960s was the role of the mute murderer Jef Costello in Melville’s minimalist film noir, The Samourai. Delon’s dark, statuesque portrayal of a man of few words received praise from critics and the role remains one of the most memorable of his career. “It is something that transcends me, that exists beyond me,” he told the Cinema booklets in an interview. “I am the samurai, but unconsciously.”

Delon made more than 30 films in the 1970s, although he starred in fewer masterpieces than in the previous decade. He managed to work with Melville again for the crime saga. The Red Circlea French commercial hit, which is now considered one of the greatest heist movies of all time, and then for A Flic (1972), the director’s last feature film.

He also worked with Deray again on the Marseille-set gangster film Borsalinowith Belmondo in the leading role, and its successor Borsalino & Co. (1974); played a professor in love with a student in Valerio Zurlini’s psychodrama Indian Summer (1972); and worked again with Lancaster on Michael Winner’s CIA thriller, Scorpio (1973).

Perhaps Delon’s most memorable work of this decade was his second collaboration with Losey, Mr Kleinabout a morally corrupt art dealer in Nazi-ruled Paris who discovers he has a Jewish doppelganger. The film, which Delon also produced, earned him his first César nomination for best actor and picked up French awards for best film and best director.

At the end of the 1970s, Delon entered the fashion business, launching watches, sunglasses and a line of perfumes with names such as “Shogun” and “Samouraï Woman”.

From the 1980s onwards he made fewer films. One of the highlights of the decade was Volker Schlöndorff’s Proust adaptation Swann in love (1984), Blier’s melancholic romantic tale Our story (1984) and Jean-Luc Godard’s deconstructed neo-film noir, New Wave (1990).

Delon celebrated his biggest box office hit in 2008 with the role of Julius Cesar in the comic blockbuster Asterix at the Olympic Gameswhich grossed more than $130 million.

After his engagement to Schneider in 1959, Delon was in a relationship with singer Nico of The Velvet Underground. They had one child, Christian Aaron Boulogne (born 1962), whose paternity Delon denied and who was later adopted by the actor’s parents.

In 1964 he married the actress Francine Canovas, who changed her name to Nathalie Delon and The Samouraiand this year they had a son, Anthony.

In 1968, Delon began a long relationship with actress Mireille Darc, who starred in the Borsalino films. And in 1987, he began dating Dutch model Rosalie van Breeman, with whom he had two children, Anouchka and Alain-Fabien.

Recently, his three children argued about his medical treatment and his finances, and in February 2024Police found 72 firearms (for none of which he had a permit) and more than 3,000 rounds of ammunition in his house in Douchy-Montcorbon, south of Paris.

In an interview with The FigaroDelon stressed that he was not an “actor”.

“My career has nothing to do with being an actor,” he said. “Being an actor is a calling. I am an actor… An actor performs, spends years learning his craft, whereas an actor lives. I have always lived my roles and never acted them. An actor is an accident. I am an accident. My life is an accident. My career is an accident.”