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<\/p>\nFrench acting star Alain Delon, whose many iconic roles included Le Samoura\u00ef, Plein Soleil and The Leopard, has died in France at the age of 88.<\/p>\n
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The actor\u2019s children said in a statement that their father had passed away in the early hours of Sunday, surrounded by his family and beloved Belgian Shepherd Loubo, in his long-time chateau home in the village of Douchy, in the Le Loiret region some 100 miles south of Paris.<\/p>\n
Delon\u2019s death marks the passing of one of the last surviving icons of the French cinema scene of the 1960s and 70s, when the country was on an economic roll as it reconstructed in the wake of World War Two.
\nThe star, who was at the peak of this career from the 1960s to the 1980s, fell into acting by chance.<\/p>\n
Born on November 8, 1935, in the Paris suburb of Sceaux, he had a turbulent childhood after his parents divorced when he was still young.<\/p>\n
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After training briefly as a butcher in his step-father\u2019s business, he entered military school at the age of 17. After being caught stealing equipment, he was given the choice of expulsion or signing up for a tour of duty in Southeast Asia (then Indochina).<\/p>\n
Delon fought in the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 but wound up in trouble again after he crashed a jeep he had stolen and returned to France in 1956.<\/p>\n
Having moved to Paris, where he did odd jobs to make ends meet, Delon got his first introduction to the cinema world through his relationship with actress Brigitte Auber, who had recently appeared in Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s To Catch a Thief.
\nAfter they hooked up, she took him to the Cannes Film Festival in 1957, where he met the actor and director Jean-Claude Brialy as well as his future agent George Beaume.<\/p>\n
\u201cI came down with a girl that I liked, who loved me\u2026 I took it all in, did the red carpet but even then, I felt at home\u2026 not least and I say this without pretension because it was made clear to me that I was not bad looking.\u201c he told a Cannes masterclass in 2019.<\/p>\n
His next big break came via the actress Mich\u00e8le Cordoue, with whom he had an affair. She convinced her husband, director Yves All\u00e9gret, to give him a small role in his film Quand la femme s\u2019en m\u00eale.<\/p>\n
Delon was candid about the role women had played in his early career.
\n\u201cIf I hadn\u2019t met the women I met, I would have died long ago. It\u2019s the women \u2013 I don\u2019t know why \u2013 who loved me, who got me into this profession, who wanted me to do it, and who fought for me to do it,\u201d he told a masterclass at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019.<\/p>\n
His career took off quickly from there, with Delon then appearing in Marc All\u00e9gret\u2019s Sois belle et tais-toi, which also featured Jean-Paul Belmondo in the cast, followed by Pierre Gaspard-Huit\u2019s Christine, which would see Delon appear opposite Romy Schneider.
\nIt would mark the beginning of one the most celebrated cinema love stories of the time. Schneider was already famous on the back of her Sissi roles, while 23-year-old Delon was still an unknown.<\/p>\n
The relationship lasted just five years, but they remained close, famously reuniting on the big screen in Jacques Deray\u2019s The Swimming Pool in 1969.<\/p>\n
Other high-profile partners across Delon\u2019s packed, often torrid love life included German actress, singer and model Nico, the singer Dalida, and the actress Mireille Darc, who was his partner for 15 years after they met on the set of Jean Herman\u2019s 1969 gangster drama Jeff.<\/p>\n
Delon\u2019s star began to rise with Ren\u00e9 Cl\u00e9ment\u2019s 1960 crime thriller Plein Soleil, for his performance as the deadly Tom Ripley. The same year, he also starred in Luchino Visconti\u2019s Milan-set melodrama Rocco and His Brothers.<\/p>\n
Other highlights of his early career include Michelangelo Antonioni\u2019s 1962 romantic drama The Eclipse, in which he starred opposite Monica Vitti.<\/p>\n
Delon would reunite with Visconti on The Leopard in 1963, co-starring alongside Claudia Cardinale and Burt Lancaster. His performance garnered him a nomination for most promising male newcomer in the 1964 Golden Globes.
\nThe 1960s would also see Delon collaborate with Jean-Pierre Melville for the first time on the 1967 thriller Le Samoura\u00ef.<\/p>\n
It would mark the beginning of an iconic director-actor partnership, which saw them also collaborate on The Red Circle (1970) and A Cop (1972), but was then cut short by the sudden death of Melville at the age of 55 from a heart attack in 1973.<\/p>\n
The 1970s, would see the Delon appear in a raft of crime thrillers including Deray\u2019s Borsalino, alongside Belmondo, Doucement les basses, Scorpio, Les granges br\u00fbl\u00e9es, Blood on the Streets, Flic Story and Le Gitan.<\/p>\n
Outside of this genre, other highlights of Delon\u2019s career in this period included Joseph Losey\u2019s award-winning Holocaust drama Mr. Klein, in which he played a Parisian art dealer in occupied France who is mistaken for a Jewish man.<\/p>\n
The film world premiered in Competition at Cannes in 1976, and went on to win C\u00e9sar awards for best director, film and production design in 1977.<\/p>\n
Director and screenwriter Costa-Gavras, who co-wrote the screenplay, paid tribute to Delon.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was completely self-taught,\u201d he said in an interview with radio network France Inter on Sunday. \u201cHe used his own meanders, and this resulted in an extraordinary truth. It was unique.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a film which gave an extraordinary dimension to Alain Delon,\u201d he said of the actor\u2019s performance in Mr. Klein. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t acting. He was it\u2026 Delon, the thug; noble Delon; Delon, prince of cinema; Delon, the extraordinary actor.\u201d
\nDespite his prolific career spanning 107 acting credits, Delon won very few acting awards.<\/p>\n
His only C\u00e9sar award was for his performance in Bertrand Blier\u2019s 1984 melodrama Notre Histoire as an alcoholic who becomes obsessed with a mysterious woman he meets on a train.<\/p>\n
Later on in life, the actor was showered with honorary awards including Berlin\u2019s Honorary Golden Bear in 1995 and Cannes Honorary Palme d\u2019Or in 2019, as well as lifetime achievement awards from Marrakech and Locarno in 2003 and 2012 respectively.<\/p>\n
Delon\u2019s star began to wane in the 1980s, but there were a number of high profile roles nonetheless, notably in include Volker Schl\u00f6ndorff\u2019s 1984 Marcel Proust adaptation Swann In Love, for which he won praise for his performance as dandy aristocrat, the Baron de Charlus.
\nIn an unlikely pairing, Delon also collaborated with Jean-Luc Godard on his 1990 film Nouvelle Vague, playing mysterious drifter Roger Lennox, who is picked up by wealthy industrialist Elena Torlato-Favrini.<\/p>\n
Among Delon\u2019s final credits are the TV movie Love Letters, co-starring opposite Anouk Aim\u00e9e, and the 2008 comedy Ast\u00e9rix at the Olympic Games, in which he played Julius Caesar.<\/p>\n
In recent years, Delon\u2019s life had been dogged by ill health and a bitter, public family feud between his three children over his care.<\/p>\n
The dispute between Delon\u2019s oldest son Anthony, by French model Francine Canovas, and daughter and son Anouchka and Alain-Fabien, by Dutch model and TV presenter Rosalie van Breemen, hit the headlines last summer as the different parties went to the media with their version of events.
\nObituaries and tributes to Delon dominated the French media on Sunday as France woke up to the news of the iconic actor\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou could say he was prepared\u2026 Alain Delon died so many times on screen that it must have seemed like a last take. God, who is a bad screenwriter, said, \u201cCut!\u200a\u201d,\u201d wrote the Figaro.<\/p>\n
\u201cDelon did not get up. He will never again take the helm of the Plein Soleil, or drown as Maurice Ronet in The Swimming Pool, collapse before the eyes of Cathy Rosier in a nightclub run by Jean-Pierre Melville. He is today freed from the war waged by his children, Anthony, Alain-Fabien and Anouchka, who unpacked their quarrel in a dramatic media-judicial melodrama, unworthy of the star that was their father.\u201d<\/p>\n
French president Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to Delon in a post on X, saying: \u201cMelancholy, popular, secret, he was more than a star: a French monument.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
French acting star Alain Delon, whose many iconic roles included Le Samoura\u00ef, Plein Soleil and The Leopard, has died in France at the age of 88. The actor\u2019s children said in a statement that their father had passed away in the early hours of Sunday, surrounded by his family and beloved Belgian Shepherd Loubo, in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-memorial"],"yoast_head":"\n