I am Portuguese and am a recent immigrant from a family thats been in the USA for 3 generations. I cannot for God's sake name any Portuguese movie stars let alone famous celebrities like artists and musician. Despite Portuguese being the first tongue in the house. The only famous Portuguese people know are those mentioned in history classes
The only person in my family who knows any Portuguese celebs are my grandparents who were the first gen immigrants to America…….
However everyone in my family knows who Alain Delon is because even my dad (who grew up in Portugal before moving at 10) ould often see movies of him on local TV in Libson. My grandparents would often play Alain Delon movie because they were big fans esp my grandma who still crushes on him tdoay (and has been since she was a teen).
Even my ma who isn't Portuguese but British had caught Alain Delon exposure because her mom also lusted after Alain despite living in the UK of Scottish ancestry and brought over posters autographed pictures, VHS movies, etc.
Someone else on reddit who lives in Croatia says their family put an Alain Delon poster in the living room so this is why I am curious.
Was Alain Delon that huge that he's not only famous in Europe at hi peak but even as more popular than many local A list actors of various countries? Excepting obviously UK which had its own separate ecosystem-and even here Alain Delon as perhaps the only French actor who managed to get a hardcore following from the French hating populace as seen in my Grandma who even often throws insults at the French like calling them frogs but exempts Delon because he's soooooo suppppppeeeeerrr hottttt (her words despite being a 60 year old grandma)-I notice so much cross Europe from Spain to Germany all the way to Russia and Seen and even as far outside of Europee proper like TUrkey and Israel………
Alain Delon has a following esp among women! Even French bashers have anti-Frenchy girls who swoon after Delon as seen by my Scottish Grandma who lived in England most of her life (enough that she has an English accent instead of a Scottish one).
Was he just that much of a super star at his peak? What at a similar level of fame in Europe to Sophia Loren and British Triple A stars like Peter O'Toole and Sean Connery?
In a nutshell, yes. Alain Delon was, in the heyday of his career in the 1960s-1970s, one of the few major international-but-not-English-speaking stars, along with a few European actors (Sophia Loren, Claudia Cardinale, Marcello Mastroianni, Curd Jürgens), and he maintained this status until the early 1980s, when his stardom started to fade. The several factors that contributed to his place in the European and global film cultures can be summarized as follows:
The sex symbol
Delon was was a sex symbol blessed with an idiosyncratic and original form of virility: impossibly handsome with a lean body and piercing blue eyes, definitely male but without the usual ruggedness of many male stars such as Clint Eastwood, to whom Delon was sometimes compared. He was eroticized and made desirable in a way women actresses usually are, and this series of photos from the 1960 crime thriller Plein soleil (Purple Noon) encapsulates this perfectly (and he was shirtless on the poster of course). To quote film academic Mark Gallagher:
Delon’s screen masculinity [...] orbits chiefly around sexiness. As lover or fighter, paragon of virtue or reprehensible cad, glowering antihero or comic foil, Delon in scores of films offers a flexible and cosmopolitan masculinity that positions him as both a figure for emulation and an object of sexual desire. In his youthful roles and well into middle age, Delon onscreen exudes a strong sex appeal that partly accounts for the sentiments that continue to accompany discussions of his films in cinephile forums.
More than an actor
Delon was one of those stars whose stage and real-life persona was front and center in his appeal. At the height of his career, he was Delon first and an actor second. He was able to "play a wide variety of roles without substantive physical transformation or modification of performance style" (Gallagher, 2013). He was not exactly typecast - as notes Gallagher, Delon played "proletarian toughs" and "aristocratic fops" - but his image was crystallized at the beginning of his career, built on "a fundamental ambiguity between angelic beauty and nonchalance and a layer of malevolent cynicism" (critic Jean Magny, cited by Vincendeau, 2000). Fellow star Claudia Cardinale (also cited by Vincendeau):
His beauty resided in his clear and malevolent look, in his nervous energy, but it also incorporated his biting irony. He was sure of himself, of his beauty, of his charm, and above all of his sexual power.
Note how Cardinale does not separate Delon-the-character from Delon-the-person. There was a form of narcissism attached to him that was appealing at first but ended up biting him in the ass in his later years, when his success no longer matched his fame: his (alleged) way of talking about himself in the third person made him an easy target for comedians and caricaturists.
A prolific and pan-European actor
Delon was a very prolific actor, starring in more than 60 movies in the 1960-1970s, up to four or five a year on the early 1970s. His range was exceptional, appearing in auteur movies as well as in popular ones (though he bypassed the New Wave for some reason). Social dramas, period movies, comedies, political movies, war movies, thrillers, adventure movies: Delon was everywhere, and there were Delon movies for everyone, in Europe at least. He was indeed one of the few French actors to have a long and successful European career. This may have been facilitated by two factors, in addition to his good looks, natural talent, and agency (more on that later). First, the standard postsynchronized dubbing typical in Italy allowed him to act in Italian movies in the early 1960s (Rocco e i suoi fratelli, L'eclisse, Il gattopardo notably). Other non-Italian actors did that too - notably French comedian Fernandel, Delon's box-office rival Jean-Paul Belmondo or the American Clint Eastwood - but Delon's few Italian movies, directed by auteurs Visconti and Antonioni, were particularly high-profile and became instant classics, cementing his international reputation: Il gattopardo won the Palme d’Or at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival. Second, Delon usually played laconic characters that relied on physicality rather than on dialogue, which translates well with foreign audiences (see also: Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, Rowan Atkinson). Belmondo, while also a physical actor, was appreciated by the French public for his wise-cracking characters and jokesy ways, but he never found an international audience and (prudently) stayed in France. Several of Delon's characters, such as his Samouraï, became truly iconic and influential, notably for Asian film-makers like John Woo.
In addition, Delon always maintained a strict control over his career, showing "considerable agency in his career maneuvers and remarkable mobility for a performer in the eras across which he has worked". He deliberately chose to work in a pan-European film-making industry, picking roles whose nationalities were primarily driven by the production and scripts, and playing French characters, but also American, Italian, or Spanish ones (Gallagher, 2013). While he later became known for his support of French (far-right) nationalism, Delon's career was truly cosmopolitan. His only mistep was his attempt to have an Hollywood career, which did not pan out for various reasons: Delon was not comfortable working in English, the movies were so-so, and his particular form of masculinity failed to woo the American public (for an attempt at explaining Delon's American failure, see Vincendeau, 2014).
So, yes, Delon in his prime was a superstar in Europe, and no wonder that your Scottish Grandma found this edgy bad boy yummy, even if he was French!
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