French movie star Alain Delon, who died Sunday aged 88, said that in Japan he was like a deity. It wasn't an exaggeration, local fans told AFP on Monday. "In Japan I am a kind of a god," Delon told Figaro Magazine in 1986 on one of his many visits to Japan, when women fainted and crowds chased his limousine.
"People get real pleasure from touching me, caressing my hand, kissing my fingers," he told the magazine, reporting on fans showering him with gifts from red roses to statuettes. Delon's breakthrough role in Japan was "Purple Noon" (1960) as the handsome, homicidal anti-hero for the original screen version of Patricia Highsmith's thriller "The Talented Mr Ripley". Delon played an "ambitious roughneck who loved money, women, and was ready for anything," said Sahoko Hata, a film critic who worked in the Japanese movie industry at the time.
"This thirst symbolised that of Japanese youth at the time," Hata told AFP. Delon made the first of many visits to Japan in 1963 to promote his films, but also increasingly to appear in television variety shows and at society events. His TV appearances frequently broke audience records and up until the mid-1970s he regularly topped rankings of the Japan's most popular celebrities.
"My friends in their 70s and 80s are still all madly in love with him. Even at 88, he looked great," Delon fan Seta, 74, told AFP on Monday. "I used to think to myself: 'How is it possible for such an attractive person to exist in this world?'," the pensioner sa.