On January 11, 2024, the courts commissioned a doctor to assess 88-year-old actor Alain Delon's health, after he was seriously weakened by a stroke in 2019. Since the start of 2024, the actor's three children, Anouchka (33), Anthony (59) and Alain-Fabien (29), have been fighting over their father's inheritance, which has been valued at tens of millions of euros.

Far from this dreary end, the first mentions of this actor in Le Monde already hinted at a career that would soon become legendary: On May 14, 1958, journalist Michel Legris published a review of Marc Allégret's film Sois Belle et Tais-Toi ("Be Beautiful and Shut Up"), in which he asserted that "young Alain Delon confirms his qualities." According to film critic Jean de Baroncelli, on June 1, 1959, the actor also showed "a noticeable personality" as he took on his first roles in the late 1950s and early 1960s. With the release of René Clément's cinematic masterpieces Plein Soleil (Purple Noon, 1960), Luchino Visconti's Rocco et Ses Frères (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960) and Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï (The Godson, 1967), every review praised the young French film star's talent.

However, from October 15, 1968, onwards, cinematic praise became intertwined with a murder investigation. Two weeks previously, Stevan Markovitch, Alain and his wife Nathalie Delon's bodyguard, had been found dead, bound and gagged, in a landfill in the western Paris region. The newspaper reported on the case in great detail: The numerous interrogations of the actor – who was placed in police custody in January 1969 – his appearance before the examining judge; and the letter Delon wrote to the French president, on April 27, 1970, in which he denounced "a police machination woven against him."

'Sympathy' for far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen

Cinema gradually seemed to take a back seat in coverage. By the mid-1980s, the idol had gone off the rails, notably because of his political stances. In November 1984, Daniel Schneidermann took advantage of the Swiss residence permit Delon had been granted – the actor had set up his company's headquarters in Geneva – to describe his views in detail: "Alain Delon doesn't like the left, he's never made a secret of it. He also makes no secret of his sympathy for Mr. Jean-Marie Le Pen, a 'sincere man,'" wrote the journalist.

A year later, in a profile by Anita Rind entitled, "Delon le Magnifique?" ("Delon the Magnificient?"), the question of his political orientation still raised intrigue: His "sympathy" for this infamous leader of France's Front National (FN, far-right) party, his support for right-wing former prime minister Raymond Barre and his "admiration" for controversial businessman Bernard Tapie, who would become a minister a few years later. In the article – where readers also learned that the actor would refer to himself in the third person – he described his greatest fear in one sentence: "becoming bedridden in his old age."

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