Alain Delon, Smoldering French Film Star, Dies at 88

Alain Delon, the intense and intensely handsome French actor who, working with some of Europe’s most revered 20th-century directors, played cold Corsican gangsters as convincingly as hot Italian lovers, has died. He was 88.

According to a statement his family gave to the French news agency AFP, Mr. Delon died early Sunday at his home in Douchy-Montcorbon.

Hours later, President Emmanuel Macron honored him in a post on social media, saying, “Wistful, popular, secretive, he was more than a star: a French monument.”

During his heyday, the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Delon was a first-tier international star, highly paid and often sought after by the era’s great auteurs.

When he burst on the scene in the gangster genre, as a sad-eyed, saintly young sibling in “Rocco and His Brothers” (1960), Luchino Visconti was in the director’s chair. Two years later, when Mr. Delon played a sexy stock trader, it was in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “L’Eclisse” (“Eclipse”).

And “Le Samouraï” (1967), released in the United States as “The Godson,” and the jewelry-heist flick “Le Cercle Rouge” (1970), in which Mr. Delon was a sinister, mustachioed ex-con, were both directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, patron saint of the French New Wave.