Alain Delon is dead. For any self-respecting Frenchman, those four little words have all the makings of an immense tragedy. The image I will take with me of this unrivalled man is the one of him in Visconti’s film The Leopard, prancing on horseback through the dust of the sun-drenched Sicilian hills, forcing a roadblock of Garibaldi’s men with his riding crop: “I am Captain and Prince Tancredi Falconeri, I fought with you in Palermo, and this is an order.”
Against the blue sky, bathed in an incandescent sun, stands a figure of rare elegance. His devastatingly deep blue eyes are barred by a black bandage, but he shrugs off his wound and shakes off the shaggy mass that assails him with that perfect blend of confidence and casualness that was his secret.
Alain Delon is dead, and with him, France loses one of its last princes.
And yet he was nothing like a prince, this child born into an honest middle-class home in a placid Parisian suburb, whom his family intended to become a pork butcher. But Alain Delon dreamt of a different destiny. In January 1953, aged just 17, he signed up for three years in the Navy and left for Indochina, which was consumed by war and living out its last French hours. He tried to find himself, was imprisoned, returned to France, ran bars, and did a succession of odd jobs, before being noticed by the actor Jean-Claude Brialy, who advised him to appear at the Cannes Film Festival in 1957. There, his terrific eyes left no one indifferent. He headed for Rome, where he was invited to try out for David O. Selznick—the producer of Gone with the Wind. The man offered him a seven-year contract, provided Delon took up English. But Alain Delon loved France too much and declined. In 1958, he met Visconti who, also under his spell, gave him two of his most beautiful roles (Rocco and His Brothers in 1960, The Leopard in 1963). In 1959, he filmed with René Clément: his career was definitively launched.
Alain Delon is a handsome man—the kind of handsome man everyone agrees on. What young girl hasn’t sighed in front of a photo of the hero? But we never talk about Alain Delon’s smile or face. We talk about his gueule—an untranslatable word if ever there was one. Alain Delon avait de la gueule, which means that his angelic physique, his azure eyes, and his raven-wing locks are nothing without the allure and powerful character that drive them.
Alain Delon entered the world of cinema by chance and was an actor who played without thinking about it—so much so that some believe he was perhaps not such an exceptional actor after all. He played as he breathed, he didn’t compose, he just was there, with superb efficiency. He spoke very little. Directors had understood this, giving him roles that magnified this silence and inner mystery, such as Ripley in Plein Soleil (René Clément, 1959) or Le Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967). Like Julius Caesar, he talked about himself in the 3rd person—but this should be seen as proof of secret shyness rather than excessive pride.
His legend reached its peak when he began an affair with one of the most beautiful women of his time—the young Rosemarie Albach-Retty, better known as Romy Schneider, who had just arrived from Austria. They met in Paris when she was not yet 20. She was to play in the film Christine, a remake of the Viennese romance Liebelei by Max Ophüls, and chose her partner on the basis of a photograph. In this game, Alain Delon surely outshone all the other competitors. On the set, their relationship got off to a rocky start: Romy didn’t speak French and Alain didn’t speak German. She found him insignificant, he found her obnoxious. But they eventually fell in love. Despite their break-up in 1963, they remained one of the most legendary couples in the history of cinema—with a grace and elegance that nothing seems able to alter.
Romy Schneider once said of him: “The most important man in my life was and remains Alain Delon. When I need him, he always gives me a helping hand. Even today, Alain is the only man I can count on. He would come to my aid at any time. Alain made me a woman. Before him, there was nothing. Of course, he left me and caused me great suffering, but that made me mature. The rest is nothing.”
Romy Schneider understood this well. Alain Delon was a man, a real man, the likes of whom we are incapable of producing today, and that’s what makes France’s tears so bitter. A man who makes women’s hearts beat because he doesn’t try to be anything other than what he is and because he is the embodiment, in his being and in his actions, of the inexhaustible and magnificent difference that God placed between Eve and Adam.
Other male figures have preceded him into the grave, such as Philippe Noiret and Jean-Paul Belmondo, but they didn’t have Delon’s aura. After him, who? The void created by his death is immense, as Brigitte Bardot, his female alter ego, reminds us: “Alain’s death brings to an end the magnificent chapter of a bygone era of which he was a sovereign monument. His death leaves an abyssal void that nothing and no one will be able to fill.”
For Bardot, Delon was an “accomplice”: “We shared the same values, the same disappointments.” And that’s where the paths of the tribute diverge. There are those who love Delon unconditionally, and those who, at the time of his death, cannot bring themselves to accept celebrating the actor’s “values” and “disappointments.”
Alain Delon was right-wing. Very right-wing. For some years now, he had made no secret of his melancholy at seeing the world he loved gradually disappear. Wokism and the #MeToo hysteria deeply disgusted him. He was adamant that when he breathed his last, he would leave a world he no longer recognised with no regrets. “Life no longer offers me much. I’ve known it all, seen it all. But above all, I hate this era, I vomit it,” he declared in an interview with Paris-Match in 2018.
Alain Delon grew up in the France of De Gaulle, whose greatness was his own. In 1969, after the chaos of May 68, he personally wrote to the General to express his admiration and disgust for the leftist ‘chienlit’ (mess). In the 1980s, he made no secret of his friendship with Jean-Marie Le Pen—one reason for his lack of enthusiasm for Marine Le Pen, whom he criticised for not respecting her own father. In 2010, the founding patriarch of the Front National admitted, half-jokingly and half-seriously, that only Alain Delon would have been capable of portraying him on film. In 2013, Alain Delon declared that he “approved” of “the Front National taking a very important place” in French politics—which led to his being condemned by the Miss France Committee and forced to resign from his position as life president of the Miss France jury. At the same time, he came out openly against gay marriage, calling homosexuality “unnatural.”
With such a track record, it’s hardly surprising that today a handful of bitter censors are rejoicing at the demise of a shameless representative of the patriarchy—a white heterosexual male who has remained outrageously dominant on the screens and in the hearts of young women for far too long. Let them spew their venom. They are incapable of making us dream, and Delon possesses the immense power to haunt our dreams forever.
