Stars I Have Known

In this occasional series I look back on some of the stars I have met in the course of an eventless life.


THIS WEEK: Alain Delon – an actor’s actor

I first met Alain Delon in the early ‘seventies when he was working on a new film in the south of France. To be honest, I cannot recall the title of the film after all these years and I doubt if the name would mean much to you anyway. But I do remember as though it were yesterday the consummate professionalism he brought to the business of acting.

What impressed me most was his extraordinary ease with the telephone. It is of course axiomatic that anyone seeking to make a career in the French cinema would be well advised to perform adroitly on the telephone, and there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that Alain Delon will go down as one of the screen’s great telephoners (for some reason, he always insisted on being called a telephoner rather than a telephonist). He made the whole business of phoning look and sound so authentic, didn’t he? And I certainly admire the way he has, seemingly effortlessly, kept abreast of recent technical developments: digital dials, mobile phones, Blackberries, iPhones – they all come alike to Mr Alain Delon! The fact is that he has done some of his best telephoning in recent years with the propagation of the car phone.

Delon was an excellent smokist, too. He himself was a Gauloise man – always had been – and some of the most memorable moments in his otherwise forgettable films involved him driving through the night, often in the most atrocious weather conditions, dragging soulfully on a cigarette. He was by any standards an extraordinarily professional smokist, and among his contemporaries only Michel Piccoli came close to him. It was instructive as well as illuminating to see these two great smokists, so different in other respects, actually practising the smokist’s craft between takes on the set. An object lesson to lesser mortals.