Alain Delon, the internationally celebrated French actor and star of “Plein Soleil” — “Purple Noon,” later remade with Matt Damon as “The Talented Mr. Ripley” — died Sunday after facing B-cell lymphoma cancer. Other projects he was well known for include “Rocco and His Brothers,” “Le Samouraï” and “The Leopard.” He was 88 years old.
Delon’s children shared the news of his death with French news agency Agence France-Presse.
“Mr. Klein or Rocco, the Leopard or the Samurai, Alain Delon has played legendary roles and made the world dream. Lending his unforgettable face to shake up our lives,” French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on X, praising the performer. “Melancholic, popular, secretive, he was more than a star: a French monument.”
Delon was considered a major heartthrob in French cinema. As the star of “The Leopard” and “Rocco and his Brothers,” once described as the most beautiful man in cinema, the actor was best known for his films from the 1960s and ’70s. His English-language films included “The Yellow Rolls-Royce,” “Texas Across the River,” “Once Upon a Thief,” “Lost Command” and “Red Sun.”
In the midst of his success, the actor found himself at the heart of a scandal in 1968 after the body of his secretary and bodyguard, Stefan Markovic, was found inside a garbage dump. Markovic had been shot in the head and beaten. Delon was held for questioning but never charged, as he was filming in Saint-Tropez at the time of Markovic’s murder.
Delon was widely suspected in the death as Markovic had previously sent a letter to his brother that read, “If I get killed, it’s 100% the fault of Alain Delon and his godfather François Marcantoni.” Markovic was known for taking compromising photos of powerful people which he then used to blackmail them, with some of the photos allegedly including shots of Delon.
Marcantoni, a longtime friend of Delon’s, was charged as an accessory to murder but released after 11 months. His complicity in the killing was never verified and the murder was left officially unsolved.
Markovic was the second of Delon’s bodyguards to meet a gruesome — and suspicious — end. In 1966, the body of his first bodyguard Milos Milosevic was found in Mickey Rooney’s home alongside the body of Rooney’s wife, Barbara, who had a gun in her hand. Though their deaths were ruled suicides, the Sunday Times reported in 1969 that Milosevic’s body showed signs of having “come to a much more violent end.”
The outlet also reported that at the time of his death, Markovic was the lover of Delon’s first wife, Nathalie. “I was hurt by Nathalie in the sense that it was flop, which I can’t accept myself,” Delon said, despite having entered into his own affair with Romy Schneider. “But it hurt me more for my son, because that’s the same sort of youth that I had, and I wanted him to have a different one. Now he’s going to have the same start as I had, which is a divorced family and separate. So that’s the way it hurts me.”
In the 1980s, Delon moved into directing. Two of his films – “Pour la Peau d’un Flic” and “Le Battant” — were not received particularly well. Following his role in “Nouvelle Vague,” Delon announced his retirement from acting in 1997.
The actor’s children made headlines in recent years. He was the father of two sons and a daughter — and possibly a third son, as the Velvet Underground’s singer Nico claimed her son Ari was Delon’s. He denied the relation, though his mother and stepfather adopted the boy. Ari died in 2023. His children disagreed about how to best seek medical treatment for him following the actor experiencing a stroke in 2019.
The children also fired his housekeeper, Hiromi Rollin, in 2023. Rollin in turn sued the family and alleged they were endangering Delon’s life. Delon was placed under “reinforced curatorship” in April.
Alain Delon was born on Nov. 8, 1935, in Sceaux, a Parisian suburb, to Edith (née Arnold) and Fabien Delon. For reasons that are unclear, he was sent to live with a foster family after his parents divorced when he was 4 years old. He was returned to his parents after his foster parents died in a car accident.
Delon joined the French Navy at the age of 17, but was dishonorably discharged in 1956. He was posted to Indochina, also known as Mainland Southeast Asia, a region that consists of five countries: Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. The Sunday Times quoted Delon as having said the time period was the “happiest time of my life.”
“I was 20,000 kilometers from home,” he continued. “It was great. You felt anything could happen, and you could play at being a man. You even had a gun.”
He accompanied actors Brigitte Auber and Jean-Claude Brialy to the Cannes Film Festival the following year, where he was offered a studio contract in Hollywood. Delon was ultimately cast in “Quand la Femme s’en Mêle” — “Send a Woman When the Devil Fails” — opting to stay in France and work in French cinema instead.
“Plein Soleil” launched Delon to international fame. The movie was followed by “Rocco,” which cemented his global reputation.
He is survived by his sons Anthony and Alain-Fabien, as well as his daughter Anouchka.