“The most beautiful man ever.” So wrote hundreds, thousands of fans, paying tribute to the legendary actor, when news of his death broke. Playgirl magazine picked many handsome movie stars for its covers: Paul Newman, Robert Redford (four times), Burt Reynolds (three times), Warren Beatty (three times), John Travolta (three times), Richard Gere (twice)… But not once Alain Delon and we wonder why. Was it because of Delon’s right-wing sympathies? His homophobia? Perhaps.
Yet memories of his beauty –of his glacial gaze and his charm– have haunted us, ever since he kissed Annie Girardot in Rocco and His Brothers, Claudia Cardinale in The Leopard, Monica Vitti in L’Eclisse, Romy Schneider in La Piscine. And raise some age-old, never fully answered questions: what is beauty? Is it objective, as it was for Aristotle and the ancient Greeks? How does it differ from sex appeal? Jean-Paul Belmondo was sexy, but he was no classic beauty. Delon was both.
Some have tried to define –or to adjectify– Delon’s beauty: “cheeky and elusive,” muses Mereghetti with a pregnant oxymoron. “Heart-stopping, almost extraterrestrial” writes Peter Bradshaw, who adds: “Delon had a mesmerically demure, long-lashed, almost feline look that could indicate something mysterious, or wounded, or malign, and was very different from the more candid Hollywood beauty of Paul Newman.” And Manohla Dargis: “Ravishing, yes, but also destabilizing (…) The eerie blue eyes, the slash of dark hair, the cheekbones that looked like they’d been sliced with a knife (…) This is, after all, a star whose looks over the years have been described as sensual though also insolent, cruel, self-absorbed and androgynous, a word that helps explain why his beauty –as with that of other men whose looks threaten tidy gender norms– makes some viewers uneasy even as it sends others into ecstasy.” Many more adjectives come to mind: elegant, cool, magnetic, intense, dangerous, impassive, melancholic… None solves the enigma that is –was– Delon. Nor do they explain why we fell in love with his anguished Rocco Parondi and his dashing, ebullient Tancredi.
“The dance is over,” writes Cardinale, bidding farewell on her Instagram page. “Tancredi went dancing with the stars.”
