In 2017, a journalist asked Alain Delon whether he believed Romy Schneider was waiting for him somewhere. He did not pause. He said, “I know she is.” She had been dead for 35 years. He had ended their relationship 20 years before she d.i.ed with a letter so brief it barely counted as an explanation. He had married other women, loved other women, built a career and a legend and a life that had nothing to do with her.
And still when asked, the answer came without hesitation. This is both of their stories and why of all the things Alain Delon was the most honest version of him is the one who sat beside her coffin in 1982 and wrote the words, “I watch you sleep.” Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon was born on November 8th, 1935 in Sceaux, a suburb south of Paris.
His parents divorced when he was four years old. He was placed with foster families. He was sent to Catholic boarding schools from which he was expelled with a consistency that suggested less misbehavior than a fundamental incompatibility with any institution that told him what to do. By 14, he had left school entirely.
By 17, he had joined the French Navy and been stationed in Saigon during the First Indochina War, where he spent more time in military prison than anywhere else. His own count was 11 months across four and a half years for offenses he described with obvious pride, including stealing a Jeep and driving it into a river.
“They didn’t think that was funny,” he said in one interview, grinning. It was a lot of fun for me. He was discharged and returned to Paris. He had no money, no profession, no plan. He slept on park benches when he had to. He ate cheap hot dogs. He was young and extraordinarily beautiful and entirely certain that things would work out because people who look like Alain Delon tend to have the particular confidence of those for whom doors have always opened before they knocked.
He fell in with young actors who invited him to Cannes in 1957 where a talent scout noticed him on the street. The kind of blue-eyed, precise-featured good looks that make talent scouts stop walking and a director named Yves Allégret offered him a role. He turned it down. He has told this story many times with a specific delight in the version of himself who rejected an opportunity he did not yet understand was an opportunity.
Eventually, he caved, he said, because the man really wanted him. He agreed to make him happy. That first film was modest. The second brought him to Vienna in 1958 to a set where a 23-year-old French actor with no real training encountered a 19-year-old German actress who was already a household name across Europe.
Her name was Romy Schneider. She had played the Empress Sissi in a trilogy of films that had made her beloved from Vienna to Tokyo. She was the bigger star by an enormous distance and when someone told her who the young Frenchman was, she reportedly looked at him and said, “Who is that boy?” Then she found out.
And then, as she later told it, she fell completely in love. Romy Schneider was born Rosemarie Magdalena Albach on September 23rd, 1938 in Vienna. Her father was an Austrian actor, her mother a German actress. She had grown up with cameras, which should have made the Sissi films feel natural. She was a child of the industry, trained since childhood in the particular performance of femininity that European cinema of the 1950s required.
She had learned to be lovely. She had learned to be radiant in exactly the way an aud.i.ence expected, and she was tired of it. She was 19 years old and already claustrophobic inside the image she had been given. Alain Delon, who had no image at all yet, who was raw material rather than finished product, must have felt like freedom.
They fell in love during the filming of Christine in Vienna. He did not speak German, she spoke French beautifully. They played at understanding each other. Luchino Visconti, the great Italian director who would later cast Delon in Rocco and His Brothers, saw them together on set and told them they had the same furrow between the eyebrows, the same involuntary V of anxiety and ambition that he called the V of Rembrandt.
They were more alike than anyone suspected, he said, two young people frightened of something they could not yet name and using each other to be brave. Romy left Germany for Paris to be with him, abandoning the Sissi franchise that had made her fortune, breaking with her family’s expectations, provoking outrage across Austria and Germany, where the press called this French nobody a usurper, a kidnapper, the man who had stolen the empress, she did not care. She had what she wanted.
By March 1959, they were engaged. Photographed on the terrace of the Hotel Eden Roc at Cannes, with the particular incandescence of two beautiful people who have recently done something reckless and are not yet sorry. She called him Grandpa, her private name for him, as absurd as his name for her.
Two people inventing their own language for the space between them. They were together for five years. Then in 1963, Delon ended it in a letter. The letter was brief. It was not the kind of thing you hand to someone you have spent five years calling Poopelay. It announced that he had moved on to another woman, Nathalie Barthélémy, already expecting his child.
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He was done. That was the communication. Romy learned in this way, from a piece of paper, that the most important relationship of her life was over. She has described the moment in various interviews over the years and always with the same quality of disbelief. Not at the ending, but at the method. That this was how he told her, a letter after five years.
The career Delon built in the aftermath of abandoning Romy Schneider was one of the most extraordinary in the history of European cinema and it was built almost entirely on his ability to embody the kind of man who leaves. Tom Ripley in Plein the psychopath who assumes another man’s identity with a coolness that is more disturbing than any violence.
Jeff Costello in Le Samouraï, the hitman who lives alone in a bare room with a single caged bird and plans his movements with the precision of someone who has eliminated all human attachment as a liability. The cold killer, the man who takes what he wants and feels nothing after. Critics called these performances astonishing.
Aud.i.ences in 15 countries made him the highest paid actor in France. Directors from Visconti to Melville competed for him and underneath all of it was the same quality that made Plein Soleil so disturbing, the sense that the performance was not entirely a performance. That something in him genuinely understood what it felt like to be the person in the room who was not quite like everyone else, who experiences human warmth as something observed rather than felt, who is capable of great tenderness and also of a letter. He married Nathalie in August
- Their son Anthony was born a month later. In 1968, while his marriage was already fracturing and his affair with Mireille Darc was beginning, something happened that nearly ended everything. Not just his marriage, not just his career, but his freedom. On October 1st, 1968, the body of Stevan Marković, a Yugoslav man who had worked as Delon’s bodyguard, was found wrapped in a sheet in a public dump west of Paris.
He had been shot in the back of the head. Before he disappeared, Markovich had sent his brother a letter. If I am killed, it is 100% the fault of Alain Delon and his godfather, the gangster François Marcantoni. Delon was hauled back from the set of La Piscine in Saint-Tropez for 48 hours of police interrogation. Rumors circulated that Markovich had been running sex parties for the French elite, that photographs existed of prominent politicians in compromising situations, that the photos included future president Georges Pompidou and
his wife. Delon’s name was attached to the darkest possible version of every story. He went on French television and faced the cameras with the cold composure of a man who had spent his entire career playing men who do not flinch. He said Markovich had been his friend, not his bodyguard. He denied knowing anything.
He said, when asked directly whether he could have a man killed, that if he answered yes, people would think one thing, and if he answered no, they would think the same thing. So, he would say nothing. Nobody was ever convicted. The case was never solved. Marcantoni was arrested and released. The affair stayed open, unresolved, like a wound that would not close for the rest of Delon’s life.
And the extraordinary thing is that it did not end his career. If anything, the public sided with him against a police investigation that seemed to be enjoying itself too much. He said it himself, “It could have ruined my career.” In fact, it did the opposite. He returned to set. The films kept coming.
The marriage lasted five years, ending when Delon began a relationship with his co-star, Mireille Darc, a French actress he had met on a film set in 1968. He left Nathalie for her. His ex-wife would later say in interviews that Romy Schneider’s shadow had never left their marriage. That Delon’s grief over the ending with Romy was a constant presence in their home, even as he was the one who had ended it.
He had missed her, Nathalie said, even while he was with her. In the summer of 1968, Delon and Romy were cast together in La Piscine, a thriller set in Saint-Tropez about jealousy and desire and what happens when the past will not stay in the past. They had not worked together in four years. They had not been together as a couple in five.
And the film, which required them to be in love on screen, to embody the specific chemistry that had once been real and was now something they had to reconstruct, produce something that people who saw it in 1968 and have seen it many times since still find difficult to describe. Because you can see that they are acting and you can see that they are not acting.
Both things are visible simultaneously. Romy said during that filming, “The most important man in my life remains Delon. He is always ready to reach out to me. He would run to my aid at any time. Alain has never abandoned me to myself, neither today nor yesterday.” She said this in 1968, five years after the letter.
She said it as a statement of fact, whatever had happened between them. She had not revised her understanding of what he meant to her. She had simply filed the betrayal in the same place she filed everything else and continued to love him. The years between La Piscine and Romy’s d.e.a.t.h in 1982 were for her a sustained unraveling.
She married Harry Meyen in 1966 and had a son, David, but the marriage ended in 1975. Her first husband later d.i.ed by suicide in 1979. She had a daughter, Sarah, with a second husband, Daniel Biasini. She became a style icon of 1970s French cinema, winning awards, earning the admiration of the greatest directors working in Europe.
And underneath the professional success was a woman who was struggling in ways that the people around her could see but could not stop. In July 1981, her son, David, 14 years old, attempted to climb a spiked fence at his grandparents’ house and fatally punctured his femoral artery. He d.i.ed in the night. Romy was at Delon’s house when she received the news.
He was the person she called. Of course, he was. She never recovered from David’s d.e.a.t.h . She had a kidney operation in the months that followed. She was found dead on May 29th, 1982, in her Paris apartment of cardiac arrest. She was 43 years old. Her funeral was paid for by friends because her finances had been destroyed by the years of illness and grief.
Alain Delon arranged the funeral. He arranged for David to be buried in the same grave as his mother, so that she would not be alone. And then he sat beside her body and wrote the letter. He published it in Paris Match. I watch you sleep. I am with you at your bedside. You will say goodbye, the longest of goodbyes, my pupule. He described her face.
He wrote, I do not watch the flowers, but your face, and I think you are beautiful. And never, perhaps, have you been so beautiful. He went back to the beginning of them. He wrote about the set in Vienna, about learning French and German simultaneously, about the day they asked each other who had fallen in love first and counted to three and answered together, both of us at the same time.
He wrote, What am I guilty of? Not guilty, no, but responsible I am. Because of me, it was in Paris that your heart, the other night, stopped beating. That sentence, he held himself responsible for her being in Paris, for the chain of events that had begun with his letter in 1963. His departure, his marriage to another woman, a chain that had left Romy Schneider 20 years later in a city she had originally come to for him, without the person she had come to be with and without her son and finally without herself. He was not confessing to having
killed her. He was doing something harder than that. He was acknowledging the full weight of a consequence that takes 20 years to fully arrive. He carried a photograph of her for the rest of his life. When he received the honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2007, 25 years after her d.e.a.t.h , he stood at the podium and said he wanted 25 seconds of silence for an exceptional woman, an immense actress who had left them.
He said her name. He asked for the applause. People in the aud.i.ence wept. He said, “For you, my little puppet.” In 2017, a journalist asked him if he believed Romy was waiting for him somewhere. He said, “I know she is.” Mireille Darc, the woman he had left his wife for, was with him for 15 years, from 1968 to 1983, by far the longest relationship of his adult life outside of Romy.
She called him Mimi. He described her as his best friend. When she d.i.ed in August 2017, the same month, the same week he had been born, he said she had been his closest companion for most of his life and that the world was smaller without her. A week before she d.i.ed, he had missed her at a book signing and not understood why.
She had already been sick. He did not know it was the last time. After Mireille, there was Rosalie Van Breemen, a Dutch model 31 years younger with whom he had two more children, Anouchka in 1990 and Alain-Fabien in 1994. They separated in 2001. His son, Alain-Fabien, later gave an interview saying his father had been physically violent with his mother on more than one occasion, a claim Delon denied and sued over.
between father and son was deeply estranged for years. The public image and the private reality, as they so often are, were different documents. He had suffered a stroke in 2019 and been treated for lymphoma in 2022. By the final years, he was at his estate in Douchey in the Loire Valley with his animals.
He loved animals with a consistency that seemed, in retrospect, to be the thing he was most straight forwardly good at. He had cats. He had dogs. A dog named Loubo was specifically named in his d.e.a.t.h announcement, listed alongside his three children as one of the beings at his side when he d.i.ed. He was known for his campaigns for animal rights.
He was, in the end, more reliably present for animals than he had been for most of the people in his life. Whether this reflects well or badly on him is a question that has no clean answer. He d.i.ed at home on August 18th, 2024. His three children, Anthony, Anouchka, and Alain Fabien, were with him. The announcement said he passed peacefully surrounded by family.
Within hours, the social media accounts dedicated to Romy Schneider began posting the same image, the two of them at Cannes in 1959, young and incandescent on the terrace of the Eden Roc a few months after their engagement with the whole of the next 65 years still ahead of them and neither of them knowing what it would cost.
The caption on most of them was some version of the same idea. He had gone to find her. After 42 years, he had gone. What does it mean to call someone the love of your life after they are gone. In Alain Delon’s case, the statement is both obviously true and obviously insufficient. It is true because the evidence is everywhere.
The letter, the photograph he kept for 40 years, the 25 seconds of silence at Cannes, the eight words in 2017, “I know she is waiting for me.” And it is insufficient because Romy Schneider spent the years after his letter trying to build a life in a city she had come to for him, loving a man who was no longer available to be loved, losing a son, losing her health, losing herself.
The love of his life was alive for 20 years after he ended things, and he watched it happen, and he came when she called, and he arranged her funeral. Whatever that is, it is more complicated than the phrase the love of his life suggests. But perhaps that complication is in the end what makes it true in the deepest sense, because the love that stays easy, the love that never costs anything, the love that does not require a letter published in Paris Match to acknowledge its weight, that love does not tend to be the love people carry for
40 years. The love that marks you is the one that went wrong in ways you cannot undo. The one you spend the rest of your life returning to in the dark beside a body wearing a long black tunic with red embroidery, saying the name you gave her when you were young and there was still time to do things differently.
Poupée Lee, little doll. He watched her sleep. He told her she had never been so beautiful. He wrote, “I learned a little German with you. Ich liebe dich.” He knew she was waiting. Now he has gone to find out. What do you think of Alain Delon and Romy Schneider’s story? Leave us your thoughts in the comments below.
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