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.

Considered the epitome of the resurrection of French cinema in the 1960s, Delon played a series 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 authors such as Luchino Visconti, Louis Malle, Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard – although he never really made his breakthrough in Hollywood.

Delon was born in Sceaux, a suburb of Paris, in 1935. He was expelled from several schools before leaving at age 14 to work in a butcher’s shop. After a stint in the Navy (during which he fought in the French colonial war in Vietnam), he was dishonorably discharged in 1956 and began to pursue acting.

He was discovered in Cannes by Hollywood producer David O’Selznick and signed a contract, but decided to try his luck in French cinema and made his debut with a small role in Yves Allégret’s 1957 thriller Send a Wife If the Devil Fails.

Delon’s 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 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 moving to the prosperous north – brought him into the circle of Visconti, one of Europe’s most important auteur filmmakers.

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 Sicily during the Risorgimento and based on the famous Lampedusa novel.

Delon’s international fame was such that he made serious attempts to break into the English-language film business, starting 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, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, in which he played a hired killer in a raincoat. The domestic success of this film was the beginning of a series of other crime films, including The Clan of Sicily with Jean Gabin, Borsalino directed by Deray and another Melville classic, The Red Circle.

Delon also found time to appear alongside Marianne Faithfull in “Girl on a Motorcycle,” in which a leather-clad Faithfull rides a motorcycle through Europe, and in “La Piscine,” alongside his former lover Schneider — which was remade in 2016 as “A Bigger Splash,” starring 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 photos of Markovic surfaced, allegedly showing members of the French elite, including the wife of presidential candidate Georges Pompidou. In the end, nothing was proven, but Delon’s close ties to 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 previous decades. Monsieur Klein won the César for Best Film in 1977. In it, 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: he produced a number of films with his own company, made his directorial debut with “Pour la Peau d’un Flic” in 1981, and promoted boxing and designed furniture.

In the 1990s, Delon’s output began to dwindle after a double 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. – Guardian