In a 1996 interview for the program Sottovoce on Rai 1, Italy’s leading public TV channel, Alain Delon, who died on Sunday, August 18, described himself as “French by birth but Italian at heart.” Speaking in fluent Italian, the actor explained to journalist Gigi Marzullo that it was indeed in Italy, encountered during a festival, that he began his life as an artist and, above all, his life as a man. Delon said he was proud to have learned a language and a “way of life” there, nostalgically evoking the Roman dolce vita of the early 1960s, painted in all its joy and melancholy by Federico Fellini (1920-1993).
Delon’s biography is also an Italian story. The actor was not yet 25 in 1959 when he had his career-defining encounter with the Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti (1906-1976). Two years later, under Visconti’s direction, in Rocco and His Brothers, he played an exile from southern Italy in the dark, unforgiving Milan of the Italian economic miracle, a period of large-scale migration of southerners driven by poverty to the prosperous, rapidly developing cities of the North.
In 1963, again with Visconti, Delon lent his face to the depiction of another pivotal moment in Italian history, playing the role of Tancredi, the scion of a decadent Sicilian aristocracy caught up in the political unification of the Peninsula in The Leopard, a masterpiece that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
Meanwhile, he starred in L’Eclisse (1962) by the great Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni, alongside actress Monica Vitti, and a decade later, he played the lead role in Valerio Zurluni’s La prima notte di quiete (1971). With the passage of time beginning to show on his face, he plays an individual with no past and no future in a wintry, foggy Rimini, lost in the political and moral confusion of the post-1968 era.
“It was through Italy, and in particular with Visconti, that, at a very young age, Alain Delon reached the Olympus of world cinema,” Gian Luca Farinelli, director of the Cineteca di Bologna, a major institution of Italian film, told Le Monde. “Delon was one of the last of a generation of actors who had a double French-Italian life, like Marcello Mastroianni, Serge Reggiani and Philippe Noiret … In a truly European cinema, more integrated than today.”
‘Forever yours’
For Cinecittà Studios President Chiara Sbarigia, interviewed by Le Monde, “Alain Delon was a protagonist of the golden age of Italian cinema. He is also part of our history.” The artistic director of the Venice Film Festival, Alberto Barbera, hailed Delon in a press release as “an extraordinary actor, an icon of French cinema who owes part of his worldwide success to films shot in Italy.”
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