Alain Delon, star of French cinema, is dead (August 18th, 2024)

In 2010, an advertising campaign brought back a 1968 face, a brown man with blue eyes, of unspeakable beauty. The few movements retained to sell a perfume in thirty seconds gave rise to agreed, but inevitable adjectives: feline, sensual, irresistible. In 2010, Alain Delon was 75 years old. The image brought out the final embodiment of the actor, and the ultimate (perhaps the only) universal male star of French cinema. The advertisement used some images of La Piscine, a worrying feature film that the actor had shot in 1968.

Directed by one of Alain Delon's elected filmmakers, Jacques Deray, La Piscine shoned all the facets of the actor, the dramatic talent - disturbing -, the imagery of luxury and debauchery, the confusion between public and private life (for this film, he had demanded to have as a partner the girl who was his official fiancée in his early days - Romy Schneider) and the scandal. While Alain Delon was shooting La Piscine in Saint-Tropez, he had to return to Paris to testify (before being placed in police custody) in the Markovic case, named after his bodyguard and factotum, murdered.