Alain Delon, the acclaimed actor who starred in a number of classics such as “Plein Soleil,” “The Cold Samurai” and “Rocco and His Brothers,” has died at the age of 88, his children told French media.

“Alain Fabien, Anouchka, Anthony as well as (his dog) Loubo are deeply saddened to announce the death of their father. He died peacefully in his home in Douchy, surrounded by his three children and family,” they said in a statement, adding that the family had asked for privacy.

Associated with the resurgence of French cinema in the 1960s, Delon played a range of cops, hitmen and beautifully sculpted soldiers of fortune for some of the country’s greatest directors, including Jean-Pierre Melville, René Clément and Jacques Deray. He also made films with auteurs such as Luchino Visconti, Louis Malle, Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard – although he never really achieved success in Hollywood.

Delon was born in 1935 in Sceaux, a suburb of Paris. He flunked out of several schools before leaving at 14 to work in a butcher’s shop. After a stint in the Navy (during which he fought in France’s colonial war in Vietnam), he was dishonorably discharged in 1956 and began to become an actor. He was discovered in Cannes by Hollywood producer David O’Selznick and signed a contract, but decided to try his luck in French cinema, making his debut with a small role in Yves Allégret’s 1957 thriller Send a Wife If the Devil Fails.

Delon’s exceptional good looks made an immediate impression and he quickly rose to leading roles. In 1958, he played a soldier and a musician’s daughter who fall in love in Christine, alongside Romy Schneider. Delon and Schneider began a sensational romance away from filming, which confirmed Delon’s reputation as a sex symbol.

In 1960 he made two films that had a major international impact: the Patricia Highsmith adaptation of Plein Soleil (also known as Purple Noon) and Rocco and His Brothers. The former, a French-language version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, made Delon a major star, while Rocco – a saga about a southern Italian peasant family who move to the wealthy north – brought him under the spell of Visconti, one of Europe’s foremost auteurs. Another Italian auteur, Antonioni, cast him as a smooth-talking stockbroker in 1962’s L’Eclisse. In 1963 Delon worked with Visconti again to make The Leopard (also known as Il Gattopardo), a large-scale epic set in Risorgimento Sicily and based on the famous Lampedusa novel.

Delon’s international fame was such that he began to seriously try to break into the English-language film business. He began with a small role in the Anthony Asquith-directed anthology comedy The Yellow Rolls-Royce. Delon appeared in Lost Command, about French paratroopers in World War II, Dean Martin’s western Texas Across the River, and Is Paris Burning?, another war epic starring Kirk Douglas. However, none of the films were successful enough to establish him in Hollywood, and Delon returned to France.

In 1967, he made the cult classic Shark Attack with director Jean-Pierre Melville, in which he played a raincoat-wearing assassin. The domestic success of that film launched a string of other crime films, including The Clan of the Sicilians opposite Jean Gabin, the Marseille-set Borsalino directed by Deray, and another Melville classic, The Red Circle. Delon also found time to appear opposite Marianne Faithfull in The Girl on a Motorcycle, in which Faithfull rides a motorcycle around Europe clad in leather, and in La Piscine opposite his former lover Schneider – which was remade in 2016 as A Bigger Splash with Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes.

La Piscine was also the scene of a huge public scandal, the “Markovic affair,” which reached the highest circles in France after Delon’s bodyguard Stefan Markovic was found dead in a garbage dump in 1968. François Marcantoni, a notorious underworld figure and long-time friend of Delon, was accused of murder, but the charges were eventually dropped. The conspiracy deepened when compromising photographs of Markovic surfaced, purporting to show members of the French elite, including the wife of presidential candidate Georges Pompidou. In the end, nothing could be proven, but Delon’s close association with a whole host of shady characters became widely known.

During the 1970s, Delon continued to make films at a steady pace, but without making the same impact as in the decades before. Monsieur Klein won the 1977 César for Best Film, in which Delon played an art dealer during World War II whose identity is confused with that of a Jewish refugee of the same name; in 1985, he won the César for Best Actor for Bertrand Blier’s surreal fable Notre Histoire. Delon also expanded by producing a number of films with his own company, making his directorial debut in 1981 with Pour la Peau d’un Flic, and promoting boxing and furniture design.

In the 1990s, Delon’s output waned after he played a dual role in Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague. He announced his retirement from acting in 1997, but returned in 2008 to play Julius Caesar in the French live-action hit Asterix at the Olympic Games.

Delon had a complicated personal life, including long-term relationships with Schneider, Mireille Darc (from whom he separated in 1982 after 15 years together), and Rosalie van Breemen, a Dutch model with whom he had two children and from whom he separated in 2002. He was married to Nathalie Delon from 1964 to 1968; they had one child, Anthony, in 1964. In 1962, singer and model Nico had a son, Christian; Delon denied paternity, but the child was adopted by Delon’s mother.