Film legend Delon says he is ready to die — but his dog must come too
PARIS: Veteran French film star Alain Delon said on Thursday that he was so sick of the world he would be happy to die now — but he wants his dog to go with him.
“I hate the times that we live in, it makes me vomit,” said the 82-year-old actor, one of the handsomest men ever to grace the silver screen.
“There are people that I hate. Everything is false, and only money counts. I will leave this world without regret,” he told Paris Match magazine in a frank, tell-all interview in which he admitted to not being much of a father to his children, one of whom he still refuses to recognize.
Delon, who lives alone outside Paris, said he wants his two-year-old Belgian Shepherd dog, Loubo, to die with him.
“If I go before him I will ask the vet for us to go together. He will inject him so he can die in my arms.
“I would prefer that rather than leaving him to die of grief on my tomb,” said the star of such classics as Visconti’s “The Leopard,” “The Samurai” and “Purple Noon,” which was later remade as the “Talented Mr.Ripley.”
Yet Delon did not rule out making room for the right woman to shares his last days.
He said there were about 10 candidates, “but for now none are quite right.”
He added he might even consider breaking his vow to never remarry if the right woman “was ready to accompany me to the end.”
The actor, who made his name playing pretty boy killers and cads, talked of his fear that he might be dug up after his death for DNA for a paternity test.
“I’ve told my daughter, ‘Please don’t let that happen to me when I’m dead’,” he said
Delon has long denied he fathered a son with Nico, the late German pop star and muse of Andy Warhol.
However, Delon’s mother later adopted the boy, making him his half-brother.
Yet Delon’s own miserable childhood badly marked him, he told the magazine.
“My parents got rid of me when I was four. I found myself with a foster family like an orphan.”
“Both of them came running back to me when I was famous. All of a sudden they remembered they had a son,” he said bitterly.