Alain Delon

The face made Delon famous almost immediately, and his screen manner ran cold against it. Born in 1935 outside Paris, he arrived in French cinema at the end of the 1950s, and Purple Noon (1960) set the pattern within a year: he plays Tom Ripley as beautiful, blank and entirely practical, and the film lets you enjoy his company while showing you exactly what he is.

Two directors got the most from him. Luchino Visconti cast him in Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and The Leopard (1963), where he is the ambitious nephew whose charm is a career strategy. Jean-Pierre Melville used him in Le Samourai (1967) and Le Cercle Rouge (1970), stripping the performance until almost nothing remained: a hat, a gesture with a raincoat, a man who never explains himself. Michelangelo Antonioni put him in L'Eclisse (1962) as a stockbroker with no interior life to spare. The best of these share one quality. He withholds, and the audience leans in.

From the 1970s the work settled into a long run of professionally made cop and gangster pictures in which he was the entire selling point, from Borsalino (1970) onward, many of them produced by his own company. Mr. Klein (1976) is the great late exception, a cold film about a Paris art dealer buying cheap from Jews under the occupation and then mistaken for one of them. He won a Cesar for Best Actor along the way, and the honorary prizes came at the end: a Palme d'Or and a Golden Bear for a career European cinema had leaned on for fifty years. He died in 2024.