Actor Alain Delon dies age 88, media report

PARIS—French actor Alain Delon, who melted the hearts of millions of film fans whether playing a murderer, hoodlum or hit man in his postwar heyday, has died, French media reported on Sunday. He was 88.

Delon had been in poor health since suffering a stroke in 2019, rarely leaving his estate in France’s Val de Loire region.

With striking blue eyes, Delon was sometimes referred to as the “French Frank Sinatra” for his handsome looks, a comparison Delon disliked. Unlike Sinatra, who always denied connections with the Mafia, Delon openly acknowledged his shady pals in the underworld.

In a 1970 interview with the New York Times, Delon was asked about such acquaintances, one of whom was among the last “Godfathers” of the underworld in the Mediterranean port of Marseille.

“Most of them the gangsters I know … were my friends before I became an actor,” he said. “I don’t worry about what a friend does. Each is responsible for his own act. It doesn’t matter what he does.”

Delon shot to fame in two films by Italian director Luchino Visconti, “Rocco and His Brothers” in 1960 and “The Leopard” in 1963.

He starred alongside venerable French elder Jean Gabin in Henri Verneuil’s 1963 film “Melodie en Sous-Sol” (“Any Number Can Win”) and was a major hit in Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 “Le Samourai” (“The Godson”). The role of a philosophical contract killer involved minimal dialogue and frequent solo scenes, and Delon shone.

Delon became a star in France and was idolized by men and women in Japan, but never made it as big in Hollywood despite performing with American cinema giants, including Burt Lancaster when the Frenchman played apprentice-hit man Scorpio in the eponymous 1973 film.

Runaway

Born just outside Paris on Nov. 8, 1935, Delon started life on the back foot: he was put in foster care age 4 after his parents divorced.

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He ran away from home at least once and was expelled several times from boarding schools before joining the Marines at 17 and serving in then French-ruled Indochina. There too he got into trouble over a stolen jeep.

Back in France in the mid-50s, he worked as a porter at Paris wholesale food market, Les Halles, and spent time in the red-light Pigalle district before migrating to the cafés of the bohemian St. Germain des Pres area.

There he met French actor Jean-Claude Brialy, who took him to the Cannes Film Festival, where he attracted the attention of an American talent scout who arranged a screen test.

He made his film debut in 1957 in “Quand la femme s’en mele” (“Send a Woman When the Devil Fails”).