PARIS (AFP) – Actor Alain Delon – who has died Sunday aged 88 – was France’s greatest screen seducer. To some he 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”.
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 . 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 kill.