DELON'S GONE

The last of the screen idols who truly lived up to the title with his impeccable dress sense, ridiculously good looks, suave manner and enigmatic presence has died at the age of 88. Anyone considering making the Alain Delon biopic will be hard pressed to replicate his unrivalled on screen style and unique physical beauty. Perhaps utilising an AI clone may just do it, though it will lack that inimitable mystery he so clearly possessed.

Delon was a man whose life off-screen almost gave his characters on screen a run for their money. The tragic death of 'the love of his life', Romy Schneider, at the age of 43 haunted the French actor who thereafter continued to court women and drama in forever controversial fashion for the rest of his life. Having allegedly fathered a son, Ari Boulougne with the Velvet Underground's Nico, Delon repeatedly denied this rumour including after Boulougne died from a heroin overdose at the age of 60 in 2023.

Looking at photos of Delon in his prime, it's hard to imagine many women (or possibly men) that could have resisted such a handsome looking man though perhaps it's true what the French novelist Honoré de Balzac once wrote: “The most beautiful are those that are the most difficult to be with. Beauty becomes a curse, a prison of mirrors.”

But Delon the actor's on-screen legacy is secure regardless of the controversies that followed Delon the man throughout his life. Antonioni's 'L'Eclisse' (1962), Visconti's 'Rocco and His Brothers' (1960), 'The Leopard' (1963) are three straight off the bat masterpieces that have influenced a huge number of filmmakers including Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. Delon was the first to play psychopath Tom Ripley in an on-screen adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's famous novel in 'Purple Noon' (1960) directed by René Clément. Jean Pierre Melville's iconic classic 'Le Samourai' (1967) set the bar high for a new type of existential crime thriller movie that inspired other modern crime films such as Walter Hill's 'The Driver' (1978) and Jean-Jacques Beineix's 'Diva' (1981) and Jef Costello will no doubt be the go to style reference for Delon's best dressed character of all of time.

But for me, I will always remember Alain Delon as Tancredi Falconeri in 'The Leopard' where he plays a young man who has the political instinct to join Garibaldi's Redshirts only to later switch allegiances to the royalists where he defines a contrast with his uncle, Prince Don Fabrizio Salina (Burt Lancaster) who is greatly resistant to change and very much an emblem of the old aristocratic Sicily. And of course, Tancredi's engagement to Angelica Sedara (Claudia Cardinale), the daughter of a an affluent bourgeois, is both a romantic and calculated decision that will help ensure his place in the new social order of the Risorgimento, the 19th century movement for the unification of Italy. Delon is perfect in capturing this mercurial nature of Tancredi as he drifts between the old Sicilian aristocracy and the new bourgeois society. His character is in essence, the epitome of adapting to survive and paves the way for Don Fabrizio to accept the new political, social and cultural direction of travel for Sicily and the country as a whole. I cannot think of another actor who could pull together all these threads so effortlessly, standing alongside Lancaster's towering performance and equalling Cardinale's beauty on screen.

Delon will remain forever young as long as such masterpieces as this are available to be seen and let us hope that is for always as they are truly wonders of the screen.

As he was.

Rest In Peace - Alain Delon (18th Nov 1935 - 18th Aug 2024)