Alain Delon, the French actor who became famous for his roles in the films of Nouvelle Vague director Jean-Pierre Melville, especially “The Cold Samurai”, has died. He was 88 years old.

“He died peacefully in his home in Douchy, surrounded by his three children and his family,” his family said in a statement to AFP news agency.

In addition to “The Cold Samurai,” Delon also appeared in Melville’s brilliant gangster films “The Red Circle” and “The Curse.”

His other notable films include René Clement’s “Purple Noon”, Visconti’s “Rocco and His Brothers” and “The Leopard”, Antonioni’s “L’Eclisse”, José Giovanni’s “Two Men in the City” and Joseph Losey’s “Mr. Klein”.

After Jean-Paul Belmondo defined the French style of cool in Godard’s Breathless at the beginning of the Nouvelle Vague, Delon and director Melville deliberately redefined it in The Cold Samourai. In the film, he played a hitman who always adjusts his fedora hat to perfection, which led to the actor being compared to James Dean.

But the comparison with Dean was limited; while the American actor was prone to emotional outbursts in his roles, Delon was anything but exuberant. What was considered cool in “The Cold Samurai” could simply seem cold in a less successful film like Melville’s “The Curse.”

Still, Americans find it hard to imagine how famous Delon was in the ’60s and ’70s – not just in France but in regions as diverse as Japan, communist China (where a 1975 version of “Zorro,” starring Delon as a folk hero, was one of the first Western films shown in the country after the Cultural Revolution) and Latin America.

Delon’s extraordinary appeal was evident in The Cold Samurai. Film scholar David Thomson described him as “the enigmatic angel of French cinema, only 32 in 1967 and almost feminine. Yet so serious and flawless that he was thought to be lethal or powerful. He was also close to the real French underworld at the time.” Thomson added: “Delon is not so much a good actor as an astonishing presence – no wonder he was so delighted when he discovered that what Melville wanted most from him was his willingness to be photographed.”

Roger Ebert called Delon “the tough pretty boy of French cinema, an actor who was so incredibly good-looking that his best strategy for dealing with his looks was to put on a poker face.”

In The Cold Samourai, Melville meticulously follows Delon’s killer, Jef Costello, as he creates an alibi, kills the owner of a nightclub, survives a police lineup, discovers that his employers have betrayed him, and is hunted by the police. The plot is far less important than the style of the film, the style in which Delon portrays the killer.

Delon’s first major film was René Clement’s 1960 Purple Noon, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, in which Delon plays the sociopath Tom Ripley, who murders his friend and assumes his identity. The film made the actor a star. (The film was restored in 2012 and screened at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival as part of a retrospective honoring the actor.)

In Visconti’s excellent opera Rocco and His Brothers, also filmed in 1960, Delon played the title character, part of a poor family that moves from southern Italy to the north of Milan in search of better opportunities. His rather passive character reluctantly becomes a boxer to support the family.

A few years later, Delon worked for Visconti again in the director’s 1963 masterpiece, The Leopard, in which Burt Lancaster played a 19th-century Sicilian prince who must come to terms with the revolution and its consequences for his family and social class. Delon played his dashing nephew, who joins the revolutionaries and then joins the king’s army; there was a palpable chemistry between him and the beautiful Claudia Cardinale in the film.

In 1962, Delon starred alongside Monica Vitti in Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, the second part of the director’s justly famous alienation trilogy. Delon was perfectly cast in the role of an enterprising stockbroker who becomes involved with Vitti’s character but is unwilling and unable to satisfy her emotional needs.

In 1969 he starred alongside Romy Schneider and Maurice Ronet in the erotically charged thriller “La Piscine” (The Swimming Pool).

He starred with Richard Burton (who played the title role), Schneider and Valentina Cortese in Joseph Losey’s The Assassination of Trotsky in 1972, and worked for Losey a few years later in the brilliant Mr. Klein, in which Del0n gave a tightly controlled portrayal of a Catholic art dealer in occupied Paris who profits from wealthy Jews being carted off with art collections – but gets into trouble himself as he is increasingly mistaken for an elusive Jew using his name for secret operations. Delon was one of the film’s producers.

Delon starred in three films with a French superstar of an earlier generation, Jean Gabin: the crime dramas Any Number Can Win (1963), The Clan of Sicily (1969) and Two Men in a Town (1973). The latter also featured a young Gérard Depardieu in a small role, bridging the gap between three generations.

Delon also played a supporting role as a photographer alongside Shirley MacLaine in the 1964 international production “The Yellow Rolls-Royce”, starring Rex Harrison and Ingrid Bergman.

The actor was among a number of French stars (and some American ones, including Kirk Douglas and Glenn Ford) who starred in René Clement’s baffling story of the final days of the Nazi occupation of the French capital, Is Paris Burning? (1966).

In 1971, Delon starred alongside Charles Bronson, Toshiro Mifune, Ursula Andress and Capucine in the international production “Red Sun,” directed by Terence Young; the western, shot in Spain, was not well received in the United States but was successful in Europe and Asia. (Delon, who became interested in Japan through “The Cold Samurai,” had a long-standing fan base there, where sunglasses bearing his name were a hit.)

In 1973, Delon reunited with his The Leopard co-star Burt Lancaster for the Michael Winner-directed thriller Scorpio. In it, Delon played a hitman tasked with eliminating Lancaster’s weary spy who wants out of the game. (Oddly enough, Winner’s previous film, The Mechanic, starring Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent, had almost exactly the same plot.)

Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon was born in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine. His father was of French and Corsican-Italian descent, his mother of French and German descent. His parents divorced early, and Delon’s tumultuous childhood included frequent expulsions from school. After military service in French Indochina, he worked odd jobs in the Paris area, where he met the actor Jean Claude Brialy, who invited him to the Cannes Film Festival in 1956, where Delon made some professional contacts.

He made his film debut the following year with a small role in Yves Allegret’s “Send a Woman When the Devil Fails”.

While David O. Selznick was in Italy filming “Away in Another World,” or perhaps in Cannes, he met Delon and offered him a Hollywood contract on the condition that the aspiring actor learn English. Delon, however, rejected any such proposals, but over the years he made three American films: the 1964 crime drama “Once a Thief” with Ann-Margret and Van Heflin, the 1966 western “Four for Texas” with Dean Martin, and “Airport ’79: The Concorde,” in which he played the captain of the ship in distress.

There was a period in the early 1980s when Delon was pursuing a career behind the camera. This began in 1981 with Pour la peau d’un flic, an adaptation of a Jean-Patrick Manchette novel, which he directed and in which he starred alongside Anne Parillaud. The following year came Le choc, which he and Robin Davis again adapted and co-directed a Manchette novel (though Delon was uncredited), and in which Delon starred alongside Catherine Deneuve. Finally, in 1983, came Le battant, in which Delon was among those who adapted an André Caroff novel, which he co-directed with Davis (though Davis was uncredited this time), and in which he starred. These films all belonged to the genre in which the actor was most comfortable and with which he was most associated, namely crime dramas, but they were mediocre attempts.

In the 1980s he adapted several more novels into films and wrote some original screenplays.

More importantly, however, Delon served as producer on 30 of his films.

In 2003/04 he played the title role in the French TV crime drama “Frank Riva” and in 2008 he played the role of Julius Caesar in the film “Asterix at the Olympic Games”.

At the height of his career in 1969, the actor became embroiled in a scandal that had both criminal and political dimensions. Stevan Markovic, the former bodyguard of Delon and his wife Nathalie (who appeared with him in The Cold Samurai), was murdered – his body was found in the forest – and investigators found a letter from Markovic linking the Delons to a Corsican fighter named François Marcantoni, who in turn was linked to former French President Georges Pompidou. The Delons were questioned by police about the murder, and it was unclear how far the scandal would spread; only Marcantoni was convicted.

Delon’s love life attracted a great deal of interest in the French media. From 1959 to 1964, he was in a relationship with German actress Romy Schneider, but even after that he remained emotionally attached to her. She eventually died in 1982 from a mixture of painkillers and alcohol. At the 2008 Césars, Delon took the stage to accept an award on her behalf to mark her 70th birthday and asked the audience to honor her with a standing ovation.

However, during his relationship with Schneider, he had an affair with Nico (of Velvet Underground) and fathered a son, Ari Boulogne.

He married Nathalie Barthélemy in 1964 and had a son, Anthony. The couple divorced in 1969.

Delon then dated French actress Mireille Darc for 15 years and then Dutch model Rosalie van Breemen, with whom he had two children, but the relationship ended in 2002.

In 2019 he was awarded the Honorary Golden Palm.

His family placed him under guardianship in 2024 after he suffered a stroke in 2019.