French actor Alain Delon, the ultimate pretty-boy killer, to retire – after one last film
Handsome screen legend credited with inventing the cerebral-hitman character, now 81, to play a character that’s ‘pretty much me’ opposite Juliette Binoche in his final film
Alain Delon, the French star dubbed one of “the best looking actors of all time”, has declared he is calling time on his career.
The 81-year-old screen legend – who is credited with inventing the character of the cerebral hitman, which has since become a Hollywood standard – says he will do one last film and a play before retiring.
“I am the age that I am, and after having the career that I have had I am finishing it... it is not the end of my life, but the end of my career,” he said in an interview on Tuesday.
Delon shot to fame in the early 1960s playing pretty boy killers and schemers in such classic films as Plein Soleil – later remade as The Talented Mr Ripley – and Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard .
Hollywood directors from Martin Scorsese to Steven Soderbergh have credited him with creating the template for the thinking trigger man in Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 classic Le Samurai .