She grew up hearing about her beauty constantly. On the street, people stopped his mother to say: “How beautiful your son is!” She couldn’t stand being touched, so when she walked him through the Sceaux park, she had a small sign on the stroller that warned: “Look at me but don’t touch me!” the actor told Paris Match magazine years before he died.
The boy with blue eyes, and a look that used to be defined as cold, was born on November 8, 1935, in Sceaux, in the suburbs of Paris, son of a film projector – and later director of a small cinema in Bourg-la-Reine – and a woman who worked in a pharmacy and as a cinema usher who dreamed of being an actress.
He was barely four years old when his parents decided to separate and rebuild their lives. He never saw them together. His mother on one hand, his father on the other. Each one on a shore, and he on an island in the middle. “They were getting divorced, rebuilding their lives and I found myself placed in a host family, like an orphan“It was then that he understood what breakup and abandonment meant. “How can you understand that your parents get rid of you when you are only four years old?” he would remember many years later.
“My mother came sometimes, my father never. They had rebuilt their lives, had other children, I was not their priority. I was 4 years old and they kicked me out. I only have “half”, half brothers, half sisters. “I stayed close to Paule-Edith, my mother’s daughter, I saw my half-siblings again from time to time, but that is not what I call a family,” he said.
The school was another hostile territory. Intelligent, but rebellious, unable to accept rules or limits, he accumulated sanctions and expulsions. They changed him from institution countless times. “He was undisciplined, insolent, a difficult child,” he would admit later.
From his childhood he remembered episodes that marked him with his host family in Fresnes, near a prison which, as he would later say, fascinated him. From the patio he heard the sharp sound of bullets when Laval was shot in 1945. The French politician was tried and convicted of treason and collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II.
That substitute family, loving and severe at the same time, taught him respect, discipline and the notion of limits. However, he never felt completely at home. “I realized early on that I would only get ahead by leaving,” he would later say. And so he did: at the age of seventeen, he enlisted in the army to go to the Indochina war. “The age of majority was then 21 years old and my parents signed the enlistment authorization without hesitation, like they’re getting rid of me once again. I resent them for that. You don’t send a 17-year-old boy to war… 17 years old… He was only 17 years old!“, he recalled bitterly at 82 years old.
There he learned to survive, to obey and to remain silent. The army forged it forever. He came back alive, but hardened. At that time he still did not imagine the destiny that awaited him. He had left school at 14 years old. He was a butcher at his mother’s new husband’s place. and lacked any kind of artistic ambition. What came next was a succession of coincidences, of women who pushed him towards the cinema, of looks that stopped him in the street. However, that beauty that everyone celebrated was, for him, a gift and a condemnation. “If I had understood that it was a power, I would not have started my life as a butcher,” he would later reflect.
The abandoned child remained inside the famous man. He never stopped feeling alone, not even surrounded by admiration. “Even when I loved a woman, I felt alone,” he admitted. “That loneliness that I have always carried surely comes from childhood. “I was only 4 years old when I understood that one can be abandoned by those who love the most,” express. “Anyway, I have to thank my mother, because it was she who gave me the face I had and everything happened thanks to that. I had everything thanks to that beauty. So yes, I say ‘thank you mom’. I am her portrait, she was magnificent. At least I owe her that,” he added.
That broken childhood turned him into someone distant and suspicious, someone who never stopped searching for what he lost too soon. The years brought fame, money, applause, and the unconditional love of the public. “I didn’t fight to have the life and career I’ve had, but that’s how it is and sometimes I don’t even believe it myself. I’m an actor and not a comedian, I didn’t go to the conservatory. I didn’t do anything, I left school at 14 and did military service. I’m an actor like Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura or Burt Lancaster. A strong personality that they took and put in the cinema. And I can say, without false modesty, that I have successful in this job.
Answer: the boy in the photo is Alain Delon
