Alain Delon, who has died aged 88, was one of the most prominent and magnetic French actors of the post-war era; his dazzling good looks and his lack of formal training sometimes led people to underrate his talents as an actor, yet there were few better equipped to portray enigmatic and morally corrupted youth. At the height of his powers, Delon, with his piercing blue eyes, high cheekbones and delinquent vitality, was considered, as Time magazine described him, “the most handsome man in the world”. He was often described as “the French Sinatra” and, as a young man, told friends that the great American crooner, notorious for his underworld associations, was his idol.
“I can’t open a drawer,” Delon’s first wife complained in a French television documentary, “without finding a gun in it.” Delon was seldom troubled by self-doubt. He was one of the first international stars to “brand” himself, first with a range of fragrances, clothes and sunglasses and later, by allowing the marketing of “Alain Delon” cigarettes.
He drifted into acting in the early 1950s, working with many New Wave directors and appearing in international productions. He possessed an icy impassivity, projecting a moral ambivalence that enabled him to switch from sadist to seducer with barely a twitch – a duality which exploited when he cast Delon as a pair of polar opposite twins in Nouvelle Vague (1990). His breakthrough came with René Clément’s stylish Plein Soleil (1960), a.