In the antagonistic star couple he formed with the extraverted, cheeky Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon always embodied silence, muteness and self-enclosure. On the release of Alain Cavalier's L'Insoumis (The Unvanquished, 1964), François Mauriac wrote this sly compliment in Le Figaro littéraire: "He never speaks so well as when he's silent." We have to question this scarcity of words. Was it the price of that carnal, brutal seduction that dispenses entirely with words? Was it a break with a typically French tradition founded on a love of language and rhetoric? Was it the sign of some unmentionable secret to be protected? But what secret? Perhaps that of the actor's muted ambivalence, a trait that best defines him, as a man and as an actor, and explains the disturbance he arouses.

It's understood that the shocks that cause this disturbance must be kept quiet. Great art and vile commerce. Grace and violence. Angelism and depravity. Femininity and virility. Regulars and mistresses. The cop and the thug. Progressive acts and reactionary ideology. There's too much scandal in holding it all together. The sign of duality, stamped like a desirable infamy on the frontispiece of his career, arrived very early, when he took over from Gérard Philipe. The dates are striking. The idol of French cinema in the 1950s and the embodiment of an idealized tradition, the gentle, romantic Philipe died of cancer in 1959. The previous year, Delon landed his first leading role in Pierre Gaspard-Huit's Christine, a mediocre remake of Max Ophuls' Liebelei, in which he played a young lieutenant in love but destined for a tragic fate.

This role is not so far removed from the one played by Philipe in one of his greatest successes, René Clair's Les Grandes Manœuvres (The Grand Maneuver, 1955). This was not the first coincidence between the two male icons of French cinema, as Christian-Jaque proved when he directed Fanfan la Tulipe (1952) with the former and La Tulipe noire (The Black Tulip, 1964) with the latter, 12 years apart. Delon played the dual role of twin brothers, aristocrats working for justice on the eve of the French Revolution. But it was clearly not so much in the resemblance as in the dissimilarity to Philipe that Delon would come to replace him in the hearts of audiences.

Far from the image of his predecessor, who was infinitely darker, more devious, more thuggy and wilder, Delon found in René Clément the director who defined his image, entrusting him with the role of Tom Ripley in Plein soleil (Purple Noon, 1960), adapted from the novel by Patricia Highsmith. An ambiguous, elegant and devastatingly handsome usurper, he murders Maurice Ronet's character, symbolically ridding himself of this potential rival, another handsome man in troubled waters. This double face was often found walking a tightrope in his great films, whether as the depraved revolutionary in Luchino Visconti's Le Guépard (The Leopard, 1963) or as the far-right militant seized by grace in L'Insoumis.

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