Actor Alain Delon — who died yesterday aged 88 — was France’s greatest screen seducer.
To some he was the sexiest man of the 20th century who played the impeccably tailored, ice-cold killers popularized by 1960s New Wave films to perfection.
To others, the man who often referred to himself in the third person and admitted to having slapped a woman, was an egotistical chauvinist, with feminists appalled by the lifetime achievement award the Cannes Film Festival gave him in 2019.
Photo: AFP
His millions of fans, from France to Japan — where Delon was adored as an idol of male beauty — were prepared to overlook his failings.
The whiff of sulfur and his angelic face also proved an irresistible combination to a long line of glamorous actresses who fell for him.
In a note to Delon on his 80th birthday, one of his oldest friends, fellow 1960s icon Brigitte Bardot, called him “an eagle with two heads ... the best and the worst.”
Delon’s legend was launched in 1960, playing pretty boy killers and mysterious schemers in Purple Noon — later remade as The Talented Mr Ripley — and Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard. He then set the template for one of Hollywood’s favorite tropes — the mysterious, cerebral hit man — with his staggering performance as the silent killer in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samurai (1967).
Directors from Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino to John Woo (吳宇森) all acknowledge a debt to the inner life Delon gave his stylish killer.
Despite the mixed emotions he generated, film historian Jean-Michel Frodon said no other French male actor in the last half century “had the same screen presence.”
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of
RSS