Nathalie Delon

The stigma of the wife of

Francine Canovas arrived in Paris in 1962 with a suitcase and a divorce in tow. She wasn't looking for film, but film found her in a fashionable nightclub. There she met Alain Delon. He was at the peak of his popularity, and she was an unknown who would eventually take his name and his attention during a turbulent decade.

They married in secret in August 1964.

They soon made Le Samouraï together under Jean-Pierre Melville's direction. The director wanted a specific coolness and found it in Nathalie's face. She played Jane Lagrange with a detachment that never seemed forced. But living in the shadow of France's most handsome man came at a price too high for her temperament.

The marriage lasted barely five years.

Nathalie didn't slow down after her official divorce in 1969. She appeared in films such as L'Armée des ombres and Sex-shop by Claude Berri. Her image projected a cool, modern edge that sometimes irritated purists of French cinema. And the truth is, she never wanted to fit the mold of the passive muse the system expected.

Directing as a Refuge

In the 1980s, she decided she preferred to be in charge on set. She wrote and directed Ils appellent ça un accident in 1982. French critics were not especially kind to her debut behind the camera. But she cared little for the opinions of Parisian salons, because she already knew the mechanics of rejection.

She repeated the experience in 1988 with Sweet Lies. It was a production shot in English that aimed for a broader international market. The film starred Treat Williams and explored the games of seduction from a female perspective that was rare in the industry at the time. Nathalie Delon financed some of her projects to keep the creative control that no one was willing to hand her for free.

And she only partly succeeded.

During that period, she also worked on less ambitious television productions. She never regained the media spotlight of her years with Delon, but she gained an independence she valued above magazine covers. Her scripts dealt with emotional accidents and with women who didn't ask permission to leave.

Silence and Farewell in Paris

She spent much of her final years far from the media spotlight and red carpets. She moved to the United States for a long period and returned to France to be close to her son Anthony when her health began to fail. In January 2021, she died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 79.

Her last on-screen appearance was documentary material about her own life, shot by her son months before the end. The funeral was held at the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés with absolute discretion and without any major industry fanfare. The film legacy of Nathalie Delon includes thirty titles as an actress and two feature films as a director.