Do we like them?

Do we like Alain Delon?

Our score: 2 out of 10. Years of public remarks against same-sex adoption and for the Le Pen family's company, with an honour or two but no real good works we could verify.

Delon's story starts rough. Reports describe a troubled childhood, with his mother placing him in a children's home, and a stint in the navy and Indochina that ended with him reportedly discharged over stealing a jeep. He landed in Paris, met Jean-Paul Belmondo, and became a star with Purple Noon in 1960.

The ugliest chapter is the 1968 Markovic affair. His former bodyguard Stevan Markovic was found dead outside Paris, Delon was arrested and questioned, and a Corsican gangster friend of his, François Marcantoni, was held for about a year and released without a conviction. The case was dropped unsolved, and Chisholm's new book alleges Marcantoni was the killer, not Delon.

Now the harm check. In 2013, on France 2, he said he was fine with gay marriage but “I am against the adoption of children”, and he also said men should woo women, not get picked up by guys. In 2019 he repeated his opposition to same-sex adoption. Malay Mail also reports he called Jean-Marie Le Pen a “dear friend” and defended Nadine Morano after her 'white race country' remark, saying “She has the balls to say it.”

There's nothing recent in the work column: he effectively left film around 2000, mostly working in television afterwards, and popped up as Julius Caesar in an Asterix film in 2008. What has been recent is a messy family fight over his estate and the rights to his name and image, with a court hearing set for March 2026. You'd need to ask the family how it ended.

The good stuff is mostly on the screen. Le Samouraï went on to influence directors like Scorsese and Tarantino, he won a César for Our Story in 1985, and Cannes gave him an honorary Palme d'Or in 2019 despite the protests. We couldn't verify any charity work or anything he did for others at a cost to himself.

He told Journal du Dimanche in 2019 that his career was “irreproachable” and he was “right-wing, full stop”, denying he backed the far right. That's his line. Our line is that the remarks and the company he kept say more than the denial.