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Alain Delon shows how easily we’re fooled by beauty
The French actor was incredibly handsome but a terrible person and would not have been given licence without his looks
www.thetimes.com
Alain Delon shows how easily we’re fooled by beauty
The French actor was incredibly handsome but a terrible person and would not have been given licence without his looks
Sarah Ditum
Friday August 23 2024, 5.00pm BST, The Times
A
lain Delon, the French actor who died this week aged 88, was beautiful. Ludicrously, luminously beautiful. A few of the tributes gamely pointed out that he was also very talented, which was true. His performances in films like Rocco and His Brothers and The Leopard were charismatic and refined. But his talent really subsisted in the way he deployed his absurd excess of handsomeness to seduce the audience.
He was also — though it pains me to speak ill of the dead, especially when the dead are painfully hot — a terrible person. As a young man, he fell in with gangsters: there was a near career-ending scandal when his bodyguard was found murdered near his home (an associate of Delon’s was indicted but noone was ever convicted). As an old man, he became a crusty reactionary, endorsing the hard-right National Front and calling homosexuality “against nature”.
And if his politics were rum, there was not much to redeem him in his private life. He boasted about having slapped women. He treated his three acknowledged children abominably, openly playing favourites in public. Unsurprisingly, this led to equally public bitterness between them: in his final years their battles over who controlled their ailing father (and his not insignificant fortune) made constant headlines.
He probably had a fourth child, fathered with the singer Nico, but — in another stunning demonstration of character — Delon denied paternity. Nico’s drug addiction meant she couldn’t care for her son, and Delon’s mother adopted the boy, called Christian. Christian died of a heroin overdose in 2023, his efforts to claim his father rejected to the end.
Alain Delon as Tom Ripley in Plein Soleil. With his high cheekbones and transfixing blue eyes, he was playing against type when he portrayed the villain
At least Delon had one redeeming feature: he loved dogs, owning over 50 in his life and building a dedicated dog cemetery in his country estate. He held special affection for Loubo, the Belgian shepherd who accompanied him in his last years. He said he loved Loubo “like a child”. In the family’s announcement of Delon’s death, Loubo was named alongside the three children as being “deeply saddened to announce the passing of their father”.
As it turned out, Loubo had particular reason to be sad, though being a dog he was happily ignorant of this. One of Delon’s last wishes had been for Loubo to die alongside him. “If I die before him, I’ll ask the vet to take us away together,” he told Paris Match in 2018. “He’ll put him to sleep in my arms.” Loving Loubo “like a child” apparently meant having no idea that Loubo existed independently of him.
Public outcry after Delon’s death meant Loubo was saved, but this was the perfect postscript to Delon’s life of narcissism and casual cruelty. He cared about his image: he tried to suppress an unauthorised biography by Bernard Violet published in 2000. But he didn’t seem to care about the trail of wreckage he left behind him.
You can look for explanations in Delon’s past, and find them too. At four, his parents divorced, and he was abandoned to a foster family. As an adolescent he dipped into petty crime; his military career ended with him being court-martialled for stealing a jeep. It was his staggering good looks that led to him being discovered and put on the path to a career in film. Without them, he’d have been just another thug born of neglect.
But his beauty also makes him a puzzle. Because he did not look like a bad person, whatever one of those is supposed to look like. In cinema, bad guys are stereotypically ugly or deformed and it’s only very recently that campaign groups have succeeded in getting film-makers to rethink the habit of treating facial scars as the sign of an evil nature.
Delon’s gorgeous face, with his high cheekbones and transfixing blue eyes, meant he was apparently playing against type when he played the villain — which he did, to excellent effect. In the 1960 film Plein Soleil, he played Tom Ripley, the sociopath you root for even as he destroys everyone who trusts him. In Le Samouraï he was a brooding assassin, being adored by women in between murders.
There was always something thrilling and transgressive in Delon’s performance, because he always had the benefit of beauty. Humans constantly confound good looks with good nature. It has nothing to do with sexual desire — both men and women make this error about both men and women, regardless of orientation. Attractive people get paid more. They are preferred for leadership positions. We consider them more trustworthy. We even consider them more intelligent. None of this is true, and in the case of Delon it was especially untrue. Stefan Markovic, the bodyguard who would be shot and beaten to death by persons unknown, described Delon in a letter as “a dim-witted man, who defers to anyone who has a stronger opinion than his own”. Certainly, stupidity is the best explanation for a successful star associating with violent crooks, although unpleasantness may also be a factor. The director Louis Malle called Delon “the nastiest man I know”.
It is only an ineradicable prejudice towards beauty that gave Delon his power. In a less lovely package, the streak of sadism would have held no fascination; his allure made it seem surprising, and that made him irresistible on screen. His taciturn performances worked because audiences yearned to look at him. Without that ability to compel eyeballs, he would have seemed dull rather than enigmatic.
None of this is to say you should enjoy Delon’s films less. They are great because of the way they, and he, play with the coercive force of attractiveness. Still, his death might be a good moment to consider how much deference it’s right to give to the pretty; never mind the bone structure, think about poor Loubo the dog.