French actor and cultural icon Alain Delon dies at 88
The books you read in childhood can determine the course of your life. The same is true of films. My father insisted that Alain Delon be part of my upbringing, and his films remain among the greatest things that he ever imparted to me. One can get a complete education on life just by watching Delon’s films. It was therefore with great delight that I observed the recent New Right revival of him from decades of obscurity as an antidote to the ugly detour the world has taken.
Exceptionally beautiful men are sometimes reduced to their beauty to the detriment of the deeper aspects of their character. Together with the flashes the world retains of Delon’s glamour — the starlets and the style of the 1960s — it is important to remember that he was also shaped by scars.
After the divorce of his parents at the age of four, Delon spent his childhood in foster care, then a Catholic pension, and finally, after the remarriage of his mother to a butcher in southern Paris, as a teenage apprentice to his step-father. The tumult of his early life remained painful to Delon through his later years. When, in a televised interview, he was asked: “If God existed, what would you like him to say to you after your death?” he replied: “Since it is your deepest regret — I know it — come with me, I am taking you to your parents so that you may, for the first time, see them together.”
Delon’s early sense of being out of place and unwanted led him to volunteer to fight in Indochina at the age of 17. The old French adage that the only wealth the poor have is the nation itself was true for Delon, who discovered his love for warfare and France in the jungle. He later described his engagement as “having given him everything.”
But his pain remained. After his return to Paris in 1956, Delon disappears from the lives of his parents completely. He enters the world of petty criminality and learns the virtues of the underground: friendship and the code of honor among thugs. It is a lesson poor men always need to learn: you use whatever advantage you possess in order to survive. Delon spends his days with prostitutes and thanks to his good looks, falls into pimping.
Delon’s attraction to women also gave him his big break as an actor, when the wife of a filmmaker who was in love with him convinced her husband to cast him in the 1957 film Quand la femme s’en mêle. His origins in the Paris underground would be ever-present in his film career. Delon has always said that he’s only ever played himself. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his early films where he plays working class characters, above all in the 1960 Rocco et ses frères, in which he plays a young Italian boxer.
In 1963 Delon co-starred with the great of French cinema, Jean Gabin in Mélodie en sous-sol, Despite the generational chasm between the two, Gabin and Delon, who had admired Gabin since his early days in Indochina, had a lot in common. They both came from modest Parisian origins, and shared a love of boxing, a deep sense of patriotism, and a military background: during World War II Gabin had fought in De Gaulle’s Free French Forces as a naval fusilier.
In Mélodie en sous-sol, Delon plays a petty criminal recruited by Gabin’s character, playing an old hardened thief, to help mount a heist at a casino: Delon is sent out as a wealthy playboy to the casino pool on a reconnaissance mission to locate a way to reach the safe. Here is Delon as what he was: a handsome petty criminal mimicking the manners of the rich in order to exploit them.
Mélodie en sous-sol is a ceremony for a generational passing of the torch, Jean Gabin, the star of some of the greatest works of French cinema, invests the young Delon with the responsibility to carry the art to new heights and to shine French culture across the world.
Among Delon’s contemporaries it was Jean-Paul Belmondo, his fellow sixties icon, who probably understood him best when he described him as a “sacred pleb.” Despite the differences in their personality, both embodied la francité, sharing in the unity of values so marked in the post-war period in France, and they maintained a lifelong friendship.
The two shared a love of boxing. Belmondo was an amateur boxer throughout his life, and briefly went pro as a teenager. Delon found his way to the sport through his role in Rocco et ses frères, and later consistently supported French boxing, including financing Jean-Claude Bouttier in his rematch with the Argentine world champion, Carlos Monzón. Bouttier paid tribute to his patron: “This evening of the score with Monzón was all thanks to Delon. He had in front of him a young man, me, who had been a butcher’s apprentice. He had been a charcutier’s apprentice. He had much regard, much respect.”
As the Trentes Glorieuses came to an end and the world that Delon had inhabited began to change, so did he. His early success in cinema had reflected his overcoming of poverty. With his later work he came into his own as an actor, breaking free of his typecasting, and transcending his class: his racehorse, Fakir du Vivier, ultimately became one of the most famous French racehorses of its period.
Delon was a man who had remade his world. That he allowed himself to slip into a kind of obscurity should come as no surprise. Never shy to stand for his friends as he did for Jean-Marie Lepen, whom he met in Indochina, Delon took the side of loyalty above the promises of fame. Perhaps the world no longer needed, or believed it needed, the violent beauty which he represented. Yet his work remains immortal. Delon taught us how to speak, how to dress, how to drink, how to seduce, how to fight, how to live…
As I returned over decades the insouciant memories of watching Delon in my childhood living room, I was always struck by how much of his world has come to invade mine: the boxing ring, Indochina, the bordellos, the cocktail parties, petty criminality, the racetrack… Mimicking the pizarro I’d seen a hundred times on screen, I passed through it all without ever being of it. Now Delon has left it, but the light from his star remains.
Avetis Muradyan is a Chief Technology Officer and emergent markets expert based in Singapore. He can be followed @AvetisMuradyan.
