Alain Delon died at his home in Douchy, in France’s Loire Valley, on August 18, 2024, at the age of 88. His three children—Anthony, Anouchka, and Alain-Fabien—were at his side. The announcement said he passed peacefully surrounded by family. Within hours, social media accounts dedicated to Romy Schneider began posting the same image: the two of them at Cannes in 1959, months after their engagement, young and incandescent on the terrace of the Hotel Eden Roc.
The captions shared a common sentiment: he had gone to find her after 42 years. The bond between Delon and Schneider, one of the most storied romances in European cinema, began in 1958. Schneider was already a household name across Europe for her role as Empress Sissi in a trilogy of films. Delon, five years her senior, was a 23-year-old French actor with no real training.
On meeting him, she reportedly asked, “Who is that boy? ” Then she found out, and as she later told it, fell completely in love. They fell in love on the set of *Christine* in Vienna. Schneider left Germany for Paris to be with him, abandoning the Sissi franchise that had made her fortune, and provoking outrage in the Austrian and German press, which called Delon a usurper who had stolen their empress.
By March 1959, they were engaged. Director Luchino Visconti, who would later cast Delon in *Rocco and His Brothers*, saw them together and noted they had the same furrow between the eyebrows, a mark of anxiety and ambition he called the V of Rembrandt. In 1963, after five years together, Delon ended the relationship with a brief letter. He had moved on to Nathalie Barthélémy, who was already expecting his child.
Schneider learned of the end of her most important relationship from that piece of paper. Years later, she still spoke of the ending with disbelief—not at the fact it had ended, but at the method. Delon married Barthélémy in August 1964, and their son Anthony was born a month later. His career became one of the most extraordinary in European cinema, built largely on his ability to embody the kind of man who leaves: Tom Ripley in *Purple Noon*, the hitman Jeff Costello in *Le Samouraï*.
The performances made him the highest-paid actor in France. In October 1968, the body of Stevan Marković, a Yugoslav man who had worked as Delon’s bodyguard, was found in a dump west of Paris, shot in the back of the head. Before his death, Marković had sent his brother a letter claiming that if he were killed, it would be the fault of Delon and his “godfather,” the gangster François Marcantoni. Delon was held for 48 hours of police interrogation.
Rumors circulated about sex parties for the French elite and compromising photographs involving future president Georges Pompidou and his wife. The case was never solved, and no one was ever convicted. Delon went on television and said he would say nothing, noting that whether he answered yes or no, people would think the same thing. The affair stayed open for the rest of his life, but it did not end his career.
That same year, Delon and Schneider were cast together in *La Piscine*, a thriller set in Saint-Tropez about jealousy and desire. They had not worked together in four years, and the film required them to reconstruct a chemistry that had once been real. During filming, Schneider said of Delon: “The most important man in my life remains Delon. He is always ready to reach out to me.
He would run to my aid at any time. ” She made that statement five years after the letter. Schneider’s life in the years after *La Piscine* was marked by personal tragedy. She married Harry Meyen in 1966 and had a son, David, but the marriage ended in 1975.
Meyen died by suicide in 1979. In July 1981, her 14-year-old son David fatally punctured his femoral artery trying to climb a spiked fence at his grandparents’ house. Schneider was at Delon’s house when she received the news; he was the person she called. She never recovered.
She was found dead in her Paris apartment on May 29, 1982, of cardiac arrest. She was 43. Her finances had been destroyed by years of illness and grief, and her funeral was paid for by friends. Delon arranged the funeral.
He arranged for David to be buried in the same grave as his mother so she would not be alone. Then he sat beside her body and wrote a letter, published in *Paris Match*. It began: “I watch you sleep. I am with you at your bedside.
You will say goodbye, the longest of goodbyes, my pupule. ” He wrote that he looked not at the flowers but at her face, and that she had never been so beautiful. He wrote about their beginning in Vienna and asked, “What am I guilty of? Not guilty, no, but responsible I am.
Because of me, it was in Paris that your heart, the other night, stopped beating. ” He carried a photograph of her for the rest of his life. When Delon received an honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2007, 25 years after her death, he asked for 25 seconds of silence for an exceptional woman, an immense actress who had left them. He said her name and asked for applause, adding, “For you, my little puppet.
” In 2017, asked if he believed Schneider was waiting for him somewhere, he answered without hesitation: “I know she is. ”
Delon’s personal life after Schneider remained complicated. He left Nathalie for actress Mireille Darc, who was with him for 15 years, from 1968 to 1983. He later had two more children with Dutch model Rosalie Van Breemen, from whom he separated in 2001.
His son Alain-Fabien alleged in an interview that Delon had been physically violent with his mother, a claim Delon denied and sued over. In his final years, after a stroke in 2019 and treatment for lymphoma in 2022, Delon lived at his estate with his animals. His dog Loubo was named in his death announcement alongside his three children.
He had suffered a stroke and been treated for cancer in the years before his death.
