Alain Delon

Alain Delon’s extraordinary, multifaceted career (actor, producer, director, businessman) shuttled continually between the mainstream and the arthouse. A one-time paratrooper in the Indochinese War and porter in the Les Halles food market, Delon, born November 8, 1935, came to the cinema almost by chance, and without any training, in 1957. The first major turning point in his career came in 1960 when he starred in René Clément’s Purple Noon and Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers. Antonioni then cast him in L’Eclisse (1962) and his mentor Visconti used him again in The Leopard (1963).

Delon teamed with screen patriarch Jean Gabin in Henri Verneuil’s gangster opus Any Number Can Win (1963) before becoming the quintessential Melville icon in Le Samourai (1967), Le Cercle Rouge (1970), and Un Flic (1972). Delon followed Melville’s lead by directing commercial thrillers himself in the early 1980s. Delon’s major credits include Jacques Deray’s Borsalino (1970), Bertrand Blier’s Notre Histoire (1984), for which he won the Best Actor César Award, and Joseph Losey’s Mr. Klein, for which he received a César nomination for Best Actor.

Other memorable Delon films include Deray’s La Piscine (1969), co-starring his then on-and-offscreen partner Romy Schneider), Losey’s The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), Volker Schlöndorff’s Swann in Love (1984), and Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague (1990). In 1995, he received an Honorary Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, and in 2019, he received an honorary Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.