Late French star Alain Delon, 88, was billed as ‘most stunning man’

Often described as ‘the most beautiful man in movie ­history’, French screen icon Alain Delon was his own ­unabashed cheerleader, boasting to one interviewer that in his prime he was ‘very, very, very handsome indeed’.

Even as a baby, he was so good-looking, he once joked, that ‘My mother had to put a sign on my pram: ‘You can look, but you can’t touch!’

‘Women were all obsessed with me,’ said the man who was also dubbed ‘the male Brigitte Bardot’ and a photograph taken in 1967 appeared to show that Mick ­Jagger’s then girlfriend Marianne ­Faithfull was among the many seduced by his chiselled jawline and mesmerising blue eyes.

Taken shortly before filming began on the erotic romance The Girl On A ­Motorcycle, the behind-the-scenes snap shows co-stars Delon and Faithfull ­cosying up on a sofa while ­Jagger sits glumly to one side.

Faithfull would later recall that Jagger was ‘very jealous and possessive at that moment,’ and with good reason.

‘Very early on in the film [Delon] tried to pull me,’ she wrote in her auto­biography. ‘When I turned him down, he became very ­sullen and nasty and ­difficult. He was such a pompous ass.’

Rejection was clearly difficult for the man who became France’s most recognisable male export as he inhabited roles ranging from the original screen portrayal of Patricia ­Highsmith’s murderous conman Tom Ripley in Purple Noon (1960) to an amoral art dealer in Joseph Losey’s Mr Klein (1976).

Delon’s death, at the age of 88, was announced yesterday morning in a statement from the actor’s children – Alain-Fabien, Anouchka and Anthony Delon.

‘He passed away peacefully in his home in Douchy. His family asks you to please respect his privacy, in this extremely painful moment of mourning,’ they wrote.

French president Emmanuel Macron also paid tribute to Delon, calling him not just a legendary actor but a ‘monument’.

Indeed, Delon’s career spanned six decades, during which he appeared in nearly 100 films and was rumoured to have bedded some of the world’s most ­desirable women.

Said to have had a fling with Jane Fonda while they were filming the 1964 movie Joy House, he was also romantically linked to both Swedish-­American actress and singer Ann-Margret, and Bond girl Lana Wood, younger sister of Natalie Wood.

Neither were his interests ­confined to the opposite sex, according to Austrian actor ­Helmut Berger, a darling of European ­cinema who was ­himself no stranger to ­sexual ambiguity.

Simultaneously involved with both fashion model Marisa ­Berenson and acclaimed Italian director Luchino Visconti, Berger claimed that Delon had attempted to woo Visconti in an effort to further his career.

Since Delon had already starred in Visconti’s Rocco And His Brothers (1960) and The Leopard (1963) by the time Berger came on the scene, this might seem rather implausible. 

Yet Delon himself was unruffled when one reporter asked for his reaction to people suggesting ‘very, very strongly that you have homosexual tastes’.

‘So what’s wrong if I had?’ he replied. ‘Would I be guilty of something? If I like it I’ll do it. The only important thing is to love.’

Love he certainly did, but his relationships were dogged by controversy — especially in later life when he faced allegations of domestic abuse.

Neither did they ever endure, perhaps because of an aversion to commitment rooted in the abandonment he experienced as a boy.

Born in Paris in 1935, he was the only child of cinema ­manager Fabien Delon and his wife Edith, who divorced when he was only four and sent him to live with foster parents as they each ­pursued new relationships.

In a 2015 documentary, he remembered the ‘tears of my childhood’.

‘Loneliness is part of my life,’ he said. ‘I live well with it. I need it.’

When both his foster mother and father died, his parents sent him to Catholic boarding schools, where he was expelled six times because of his ­disruptive behaviour.

At 14, he returned to live with his mother and her new ­husband, a butcher who trained him in the art of charcuterie, before he joined the navy at 17, serving in the war in Indochina, as Vietnam was known before France lost control of the colony in 1954.

By then, Delon had already been booted out of the navy for stealing a jeep. At first he lived in the Parisian red-light district of Pigalle where he worked as a waiter and associated with ­prostitutes and gangsters, but then his looks won him his first big part, in the 1958 film ­Christine, starring opposite the stunning German-French actress Romy Schneider.

They became a golden ­couple who dazzled the public with their ensuing five-year courtship.

Yet although they were engaged, there were soon rumours that Delon was ­cheating on Schneider with ­lovers including 1960s German singer-songwriter Nico, a woman whose beauty led an envious friend to claim that even the ­ furniture groaned with ­anticipation when she came into a room.

After a one-night stand with Delon in New York in 1961, Nico claimed to be carrying his child, who was born the ­following August.

Even Delon’s own mother Edith was convinced that the child, Ari, was his – rescuing him from the neglect caused by Nico’s chaotic, druggy lifestyle and eventually adopting him – but Delon always denied being the boy’s father, despite the striking resemblance between them.

The relationship with ­Schneider finally ended after he met French actress Nathalie Barthélémy in a Parisian nightspot in 1963. 

They married the following year but she soon discovered that, despite the birth of their son Anthony in 1965, her new husband was seemingly incapable of fidelity.

That same year he had an affair with singer Dalida, a former Miss Egypt. And, alongside his allegation that Delon had tried to steal Luchino Visconti from him, Helmut Berger claimed he also continued to pursue Romy Schneider.

‘She told me that long after they broke up, he kept wanting to go to bed with her,’ he said. ‘He really harassed her, but she refused.’

Delon was also said to have taken his girlfriends to orgies organised by his close friend and one-time bodyguard Stevan Markovic, leading to a scandal when, in 1968, Markovic’s corpse was found dumped in a ­Parisian skip.

One theory that emerged in the ensuing police investigation was that he had been ‘rubbed out’ after staging a sex party at which a hidden camera had captured images of the wife of future French President Georges Pompidou.

Delon, who knew ­Pompidou well and was a very close friend of François Marcantoni, the ­Corsican gangster initially charged with the murder, was questioned intensively by the police, but the crime was never solved.

His marriage to Nathalie ended in 1969 after he met French model and actress Mireille Darc. After persuading her and another actress named Maddly Bamy to join him in a ménage à trois to decide which he loved best, he eventually chose Darc, with whom he had perhaps his longest and most significant relationship, lasting until the early 1980s.

As with Romy Schneider, whom he described as the ‘love of my life,’ he would later say that Darc was ‘everything to me’. But they eventually went their separate ways because he wanted children and she had a medical condition which meant that she might not survive a pregnancy. ‘I didn’t want to take this risk,’ he said, ‘I cared too much about her.’

He went on to have two more children, Anouchka and Alain-Fabien, with Rosalie van Breemen, a Dutch model he met on the set of a music video in 1987.

The reasons for their split in 2002 were never disclosed, but in 2012 Alain-Fabien, by then 18, claimed his father had been abusive towards him, his older half-brother Anthony and his mother, suggesting he had twice broken Rosalie’s nose and on one occasion ­fractured eight of her ribs.

Delon countered that his son would tell newspapers anything in return for money, but he later admitted that he had slapped both Rosalie and other women in his life. 

The resulting outcry failed to deter the organisers of the Cannes Film Festival from presenting him with an Honorary Palme D’or in 2019, nor his very unluvvie-like support for the far-Right National Front party, once describing its former leader Jean-Marie Le Pen as ‘my friend’.

His private life continued to make headlines, not least when Ari Boulogne, the man his ­erstwhile lover Nico claimed was his son, died last year from a ­heroin overdose.

Delon’s other three children were also in the news of late — engaging in public mudslinging matches in their differing views on his care and treatment following the disabling stroke he suffered five years ago. 

However, they were united in their antipathy towards his 67-year-old companion Hiromi Rollin.

She maintained that she had enjoyed an intimate relationship with Delon since the late 1980s.

But his children insisted that she was simply a paid home help. 

They alleged that Rollin had ­pressured the increasingly frail star to marry her and sign over the £250 million fortune he amassed from business interests including a football club, ­restaurants and luxury brands such as Alain Delon cigarettes, still popular in Asia where he has long been regarded as the epitome of Western cool.

They eventually succeeded in getting Rollin evicted from his countryside estate south of Paris. 

It’s there that he has asked to be buried, near the graves of the 50 or so pet dogs he doted on over the years — canine companions to whom he remained far more ­faithful than he ever was to the women in his life.