Actor became gossip column fixture after her wild marriage to French movie star
Nathalie Delon, who has died aged 79, was a glamorous, quintessentially French beauty who appeared in more than 30 films in the 1960s and 1970s, but was best known in France for her tempestuous marriage to its leading film star of the era, Alain Delon.
Their first meeting, in a Paris nightclub in 1962, was not propitious. She asked him to stand up so that she could retrieve her handbag, on which he was sitting. He responded to her request with the verbal equivalent of two fingers and shortly afterwards was sick all over her. Notwithstanding this introduction, they were soon conducting a clandestine affair.
Delon was at the time engaged to the German actress Romy
Schneider, whom he had met when making Christine in 1958; the storms of their relationship had often illuminated the gossip columns. Nathalie was 21, but already had a brief marriage behind her, to Guy Barthelemy, by which she had a daughter.
In August 1964, she and Delon were married in secret near Orleans and driven straight to the docks at Le Havre. There, they boarded a ship for the United States. As the news was broken to the French press of the ceremony, the Delons were enjoying a wedding dinner in the ship’s empty ballroom.
Nathalie Delon was pregnant, and six weeks later gave birth to their son Anthony in Los Angeles. Following the success of films such as The Leopard, her husband had landed a contract with MGM. This was soon cancelled, however, and the Delons returned to France.
By then, the marriage was already under strain. Nathalie, while admitting that she could be impulsive and hot-tempered, later characterised herself as naive. Her husband, meanwhile, was known as an ardent admirer of other women.
The tension between them charged her debut as an actress, and the only film they made together – Jean-Pierre Melville’s influential thriller Le Samourai (1967). The green-eyed Nathalie played Jane, auburnhaired mistress of Delon’s raincoated hit man.
Shortly after filming had finished, Alain filed for divorce. Nathalie afterwards confessed that she had briefly consoled herself with their Serbian bodyguard, Stevan Markovic.
When, the following year, Markovic’s body was found on a public rubbish tip, a huge political scandal erupted, embroiling in particular Alain Delon’s friend Georges Pompidou, the future president.
Markovic was said to have acquired compromising (though in fact faked) photographs of Pompidou’s wife Claude with another woman. Rumours of orgies and blackmail flew unchecked and damaged Alain Delon’s career. By then, he had begun a relationship with the actress Mireille Darc, and he and Nathalie were divorced in 1969.
She was born Francine Canovas in Oujda, Morocco, then under French control, although her family’s roots were Spanish. Her father worked for a transport firm, but left the home soon after his daughter’s birth.
Her mother remarried, to a train driver, and moved to Casablanca. When her husband died some years later, she took on jobs that included that of nursing assistant.
Nathalie Delon continued to appear in films throughout the 1970s. She was perhaps best known outside France from her seductive turn in When Eight Bells Toll (1971), an adaptation of Alistair MacLean’s smuggling yarn, which starred Anthony Hopkins and Robert Morley.
Her other films included Le Sex Shop (1973), directed by Claude Berri, and Roger Vadim’s Une Femme Fidele (1976). By the end of that decade, however, as she candidly related in her 2006 memoir Pleure pas, c’est pas grave (Don’t Cry, it’s OK), she had become addicted to heroin.
Despite attracting admirers of her own, including two former husbands of Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher and Richard Burton, she and Alain Delon remained close, in part for the sake of her son. He helped her to seek treatment in Switzerland for her addiction. Subsequently, she had a relationship for some 15 years with Chris Blackwell, the Jamaican entrepreneur and founder of Island Records.
Nathalie Delon directed two films of her own, Ils Appellent ca un Accident (1982) and Sweet Lies (1988). She lived at Sundance, Utah, for some years before returning to France in 2003. Latterly she had been suffering from cancer.
She and the daughter of her first marriage had reportedly been out of touch for many years. Her son survives her. – Telegraph Group