In a 1962 interview, Alain Delon pushes aside a carafe of red wine and explains that when offered his first cinema role, he didn’t really want it: je n’avais pas envie de faire spécialement ça. Delon, who died over the weekend at the age of 88, may not have been immediately seduced by cinema, but cinema was instantly seduced by him. In a lifetime filled with roles playing rogues and gangsters – Plein Soleil (1960), Il Gattopardo (1963) and Le Samouraï (1967) – the role he is best known for is himself, a shapeshifter who flirted with the actor’s mask; sometimes hiding behind it, sometimes letting it slip off altogether. There, in the space between authenticity and artifice, Delon found his métier, delighting in his confection as much as his audience did: ‘I fell in love with the camera,’ he says.

He incarnated a certain kind of melancholy, ineffably French beauty

Born in Sceaux, outside Paris, in 1937, Delon’s early life was turbulent. An only child, he was left with a foster family at the age of........

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