The Light That Passed: Alain Delon, Icon Of French Cinema 1935 - 2024

At a press conference in Cannes in 1990, director Jean Luc Godard said about his choice of Alain Delon for the role of the hitchhiker in his movie New Wave: 'There was a role for 'him' in which I saw only him.' Godard went on to say: 'It's someone who carries his own tragedy...'.

Godard went further by comparing movie stars, and in this context more specifically Delon, with the stars in the sky whose light only reaches us after years have passed. Appropriately, Delon's character Roger Lennox was referred to in the film's title role as "Lazy," his co-star Domiziana Giordano is "Elle."

Alain Delon was partly the archetypal film star. An endless line of women including Romy Schneider (1938-1982) as his self-proclaimed great love, - an endless line of films, some immortally good, some bad. He was also partly an archetypal rebel (which he has in common with a number of other stars) with a past as a military veteran in French Indo-China (Vietnam). Who, as a boy, was thrown out of various schools and was eventually dishonourably discharged after three years of military service for stealing and crashing with a jeep in Vietnam.

He returned to France and worked in all kinds of jobs from porter to waiter, half in the upper- and underworld of Paris. He was introduced to the film world again through Birgit Auber, who had recently played a supporting role in Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief, born as the son of a provincial cinema owner. His breakthrough film was Michel Boisrond's 1959 comedy Three Murderesses, which was a great success in France but also made him famous internationally.

In early 1990, at the time of the film New Wave - not coincidentally also the name of the movement that Godard founded - Alain Delon was 54 years old. An important part of his career had already been shot with very big films, such as the boxing film Rocco and His Brothers (1960), The Leopard with Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale (1963), both films by Visconti, with The Eclipse (1962), a film like a painting, with Michelangelo Antonioni's co-star Monica Vitti. Versatile and tragic in the beautiful Monsieur Klein (1976) by Joseph Losey from 1976 and of course as a hardboiled crime fighter or criminal in the many French police and gangster films such as Borsalino (Deray, 1970) with Belmondo, A Cop (1972 with Catherine Deneuve) by master of the genre Jean Paul Melville. Topped with Le Samouraï (Melville, 1967).

Films and great directors that all make him immortal. Even though, in Godard's words, 'the light has already passed'.