French movie star dies Alain Delon At the age of 88, according to what his three sons reported on Sunday morning, after he requested two years ago to end his life through what is called “euthanasia”, and to organize his departure in one of the designated places in Switzerland.
“It is with deep sadness that Alain Fabien, Anouchka and Anthony announce the passing of their father,” the three children said in a joint statement today. “He passed away peacefully at his home in Duchy, surrounded by his three children and his family, who ask for your privacy in this painful moment of mourning.”
Two years ago, Dillon expressed his desire to end his life by euthanasia, due to the suffering of illness and old age, his poor health, his exposure to a double stroke in 2019, and an open-heart surgery that almost cost him his life.
troubled childhood
Born Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon in the Hauts-de-Seine suburb of Paris, Delon had a miserable childhood.
The troubled upbringing Dillon received as a child cast a shadow over his academic career, which was not successful, due to his lack of discipline and constant rebellion, which cost him expulsion from one school to another. He himself describes this situation by saying: “I was a very ferocious little monster.”
As a young boy, Dillon worked as a butcher for his stepfather, and joined the army at the age of seventeen after obtaining a license from his parents, which continued to affect him because he considered it an attempt by them to get rid of him as a troublesome child.
Soldier
After returning from participating in the Indochina War in 1954 as a paratrooper in the French army, Delon tried working in modest jobs before being spotted by producers to make his first film, “Send a Woman When the Devil Fails” in 1957, and then “Rocco and His Brothers” in 1960.
Delon excelled in crime roles such as the 1963 film “How Many Can Win?”, and gained great fame in the 1967 film “Samurai”, and achieved overwhelming success in the 1970 film “Borsalino”. He also succeeded in adventure films such as the 1964 film “Black Tulip” and the 1975 film “Zorro”.
Screen Seducer
In a report on the late actor, Agence France-Presse said that Alain Delon “was France's greatest screen seducer. For some, he was the most attractive man of the 20th century, playing the role of the skilled killers who became famous in the films of the New Wave in the 1960s.”
“To others, the man who often referred to himself in the third person and admitted to slapping a woman was a selfish chauvinist, and feminists were appalled by the lifetime achievement award he was given by the Cannes Film Festival in 2019,” the agency added.
In a note to Delon on his 80th birthday, one of his oldest friends, 1960s icon Brigitte Bardot, described him as a “two-headed eagle… the best and the worst.”
Despite the mixed feelings he aroused, film historian Jean-Michel Frodon said no other French actor in the past half century had “a comparable screen presence”.
French actor Vincent Lindon, who won the best actor award at Cannes in 2015, described Delon's appearance as “provocative”. “You can look at his pictures for hours and hours,” he told AFP.
But Delon never really made the move to Hollywood despite his huge following in China and Japan, which would later boost sales of his perfume brand.
right
His complex private life kept him in the headlines. He not only played villains, but also had relationships with them. He was arrested in 1968 after his former bodyguard, Stefan Markovic, was found with a bullet in his neck.
Delon effectively stopped acting in films around 2000, appearing mostly on television after that, although he was tempted to return to the big screen to play Julius Caesar in Asterix in 2008.
In later years, he became a controversial figure due to his support for the far-right National Front (later renamed the National Rally), whose founder described Joan Marie Luban He is a “dear friend”.
He sparked further controversy in 2016 by jumping to the defence of former minister Nadine Morano who had declared France a “white country”.
