Alain Delon

Alain Delon's most cited roles hold the attractive and the disturbing in a single face. He was Tom Ripley in Purple Noon, René Clément's 1960 reading of Patricia Highsmith; the same year he was Rocco in Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers, and three years after that the aristocrat Tancredi in The Leopard. In Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse he plays a stockbroker. He worked twice with Jean-Pierre Melville, as the hitman Jef Costello in Le Samouraï and then in Le Cercle Rouge, where the same distance is kept in a world whose colour has been cooled. Criterion describes that screen presence as an icy beauty and dwells on something in his gaze that will not come apart from amorality. He played an art dealer in Joseph Losey's Mr. Klein, and by the same account no later work used his star identity to the same effect. The 1995 Berlinale gave him an honorary Golden Bear, and in 1985 he took the César for best actor for Notre Histoire.