French actor Alain Delon, who melted the hearts of millions of film fans, whether playing the “bad guy” or the “killer”, died at the age of 88.
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.
With his striking blue eyes, Alain Delon was sometimes called the “French Frank Sinatra” for his sleek looks, a comparison he disliked. Unlike Frank Sinatra, who always denied his ties to the mafia, actor Delon openly admitted his connections with his dubious friends in the underworld.
In a 1970 interview in The New York Times, he was asked about connections to such men, 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. Everyone is responsible for their own actions. It doesn't matter what they do.”
Alain Delon rose to fame in two films by Italian director Luchino Visconti, Rocco and His Brothers in 1960 and Leopardi in 1963.
He co-starred with revered French actor Jean Gabin in Henri Verneuil's 1963 Melodie en Sous-Sol and excelled in Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 Le Samourai as a philosophical assassin. by contract.
Alain Delon became a star in France and was adored by men and women in Japan, but never made it big in Hollywood, despite playing with the giants of American cinema, including actor Burt Lancaster.
In the 1970 film Borsalino, he starred with fellow French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, as gangsters who clash in a memorable and stylized fight over a woman.
Crowning moments also included the 1969 erotic thriller La Piscine where Delon teamed up with lifelong sweetheart Romy Schneider in a searing account of jealousy and seduction on the French Riviera.
A troubled life
Born near Paris on November 8, 1935, Alain Deloni had a difficult start. He was placed in foster care at age 4 after his parents divorced.
He ran away from home at least once and was expelled several times before joining the Marines at age 17 and serving in then-French-ruled Indochina. There, too, he got into trouble for a stolen jeep.
Returning to France in the mid-1950s, he worked as a doorman at the wholesale food market Les Halles in Paris and spent time in the red-light district of Pigalle, before moving to the cafes of the bohemian area of St. Germain des Pres.
There he met the French actor Jean-Claude Brialy, who took him to the Cannes Film Festival, where he attracted the attention of an American talent scout, who organized a screen test.
He made his film debut in 1957 in Quand la femme s'en mele.
