Eight broken ribs and a nose broken twice.
In 2013, Alain-Fabien Delon remembered, in the columns of
Vanity Fair Italia
, the swollen face of his mother, Rosalie van Breemen, when he was a child and still living in Douchy, in Loiret.
There, in the heart of the countryside, hidden behind large gates, fear reigned supreme, he said.
There, Alain Delon's anger fell like lashes on the woman who then shared his life.
Alain-Fabien had gotten into the habit of waiting for the storm to pass.
“Eight broken ribs and a nose broken twice.
Did she deserve all this?” he asked the Italian newspaper.
Shocking remarks which then made Alain Delon react in
Le Parisien
: “I am horrified and devastated with sadness, like Alain-Fabien's sister and mother,” he confided a few days later to the daily.
“This is nonsense.
My son is completely lost and only gives sensational interviews for the money.”
But Rosalie van Breemen never spoke on the subject, leaving a lot of darkness hanging over her companion's behavior.
Especially since these memories of violence, Alain-Fabien is not the only one to evoke them.
Other people around him painted a bleak picture of the sacred monster, especially with women.
To discover
Leadership, balance, career, money... A business coaching program for women
Read alsoThe Delon affair, his merciless universe: the summary for those who have not followed
Mired for several months in a family war, Alain Delon, now 88 years old, was also recently violent with his former companion, Hiromi Rollin.
As a reminder, the 66-year-old Japanese woman was ousted from Douchy in July 2023, accused by the actor's children - Anthony, Alain-Fabien and Anouchka - of mistreatment of a vulnerable person.
He is accused of “moral harassment”, “abuse of weakness”, “sequestration” and “violence on an animal”.
However, according to the gendarmes' investigations made public in the columns of Le
Parisien
on January 23, the reality would be more complex.
Asked about his relationship with his former employee, Alain Delon, victim of a stroke in 2019, explained to the police that a certain form of love existed between them.
To the question: “Have you ever been hit by Hiromi Rollin”, he replied: “Yes.
In response to my strikes, physical.
When she annoyed me,” before miming the gesture, that of a slap.
A ten-page letter, dated 2010, written by the employee to one of her friends and added to her legal file, notes the star's violence towards her on numerous occasions.
The magnificent thug
Nathalie and Alain Delon, in the 1960s. Abaca
For as long as we can remember, Alain Delon has always had abnormal behavior with those who have passed through his life - for as long as we can remember, he is considered a paragon of the French seducer, an icon of virility and romance.
His stories with Romy Schneider and Mireille Darc made people dream, the “dark” side remaining in the shadows.
Between the 1950s and 60s, when he was at the height of his fame as an actor, the time was full of patriarchy and misogyny.
“Alain Delon has often said that he could have gone wrong and that if he had not met some wonderful and generous women, he might have taken the backroads of illegalism,” explained in 2019 the writer and filmmaker Bernard-Henri Lévy in the Arte documentary,
Alain Delon, l'ombre au tableau
.
Thus, we can see in this statement the very condition of Alain Delon's women, magnificent caryatids at the service of his genius.
A year earlier, in 2018, to the question asked by Catherine Ceylac in the show “Thé ou Café” on France 2, “Did you behave badly with them, your women, did you exhibit macho behavior? ", the person concerned responded frankly: "A slap, is it macho?
Yes then, I must have been macho.
“We loved each other between laughter and fury,” Natalie Delon, the actor's only wife and mother of his eldest son Anthony, once told
Libération
, giving a glimpse of the threatening climate that reigned in their couple which was united for five years, from 1964 to 1969. In a cross-portrait in 1965, filmed by Alain Cavalier's camera, she recounted their first look: “It was a violent encounter between the two of us.
He was very rude.
He was actually sitting on my bag so I asked him if he wouldn't mind getting up a little bit so I could grab my stuff.
“Well, take your bag, I don’t give a damn,” he told me,” she confided.
In this regard, another woman, Brigitte Bardot, had whispered these words to BFMTV: “He is a man who carries the best and the worst within him”.
Founding traumas
Born in 1935 in Sceaux, in the Paris region, Alain Delon was placed in a foster family at just 4 years old, after his parents' divorce.
One was called to the front, the other did not earn enough money.
In the documentary
Alain Delon: A life, a destiny and a contested heritage
, Catherine Schwaab, editor-in-chief of
Paris Match
explains: “It was a fracture for him, a founding trauma.”
An orphan, Alain Delon grew up in a very modest environment, whose surrogate parents were prison guards in Fresnes, living in accommodation adjoining the penitentiary.
His adoptive father often takes him to his workplace, where he plays with the other guards' children, encountering "castagne and hatred", as the documentary recounts.
After six years in his foster home, Alain returned to his mother, then remarried to a certain Paul Boulogne, with whom she gave birth to a daughter.
“Alain is the child too many, ultimately, and he will become jealous of the others,” explains journalist Jean-Luc Geneste in the said documentary.
And to continue: “His mother is going to put him in a boarding school, in religious institutions where corporal punishment is practiced... it will be terrible for him too.
This kid will grow up with fear, with a form of violence.”
In the
Schnock
magazine in 2021, his brother Jean-François (eleven years younger than him, born of the same father) remembers an older brother who “had a taste for castagne”.
“He wasn't a gay guy, more like a young mad dog,” he says, adding that as a young man, “he hung out with Pigalle, whores and gangsters.
He was almost a thug.”
In this climate of violence, Alain Delon's children would have grown up there too.
In 2022, in his autobiography,
Entre chien et loups
(Éd. du Cherche Midi), Anthony Delon, the actor's eldest, now 59 years old, gave a chilling account of his childhood.
Like that day when, at the age of 10, on vacation with his cousins in Douchy, he behaved badly at the table.
“It’s the fork that goes to the mouth and not the other way around,” Father Alain had stormed, before yelling at him to “go to his room” and join him with a leather whip.
“Even my dogs, I don’t hit them with these whips,” he is said to have concluded the session.
“You will be a man, my son”
Alain Delon, Mireille Darc and Anthony Delon.
Getty Images
Raised with the example of this father who was as heroic as he was threatening, Anthony Delon confided that he too could have behaved inappropriately.
Still in 2022, guest on the show “8:30 p.m. on Sunday”, presented by Laurent Delahousse, he tells another anecdote with Mireille Darc, in a relationship with her father from 1968 to 1983. While Alain Delon had to go filming for some time , leaving his young son with his mother-in-law, the latter would have said to the actress: “You, you are going away”.
“I was the “man” of the house... I had the right to throw her out,” he admits on set.
We don't know much about the relationship between the actress and Alain Delon, except that he built her house in Douchy for her, before finally living there with Rosalie van Breemen.
We also know that Mireille “protected little Anthony on several occasions” from his father’s anger.
The woman with the blonde bob had notably gotten into the habit of inviting her little “Tantino” to go for a walk in the park at the start of the day because his father “didn’t like” seeing him when he woke up.
A harsh education carried over years later to his second son, Alain-Fabien, Anthony's half-brother, thirty years his junior.
In the interview with
Vanity Fair Italia
in 2013, the young man recounts the injuries inflicted by Alain Delon on Rosalie - eight broken ribs - but also his cruelty.
“Alain Delon was only violent with my mother, my brother Anthony and I knew very well how far his cruelty could go,” he continues.
One day, I secretly took his motorbike, and unfortunately I had an accident.
I broke my knee and all the toes on my right foot, but seeing me arrive limping and frantic with pain, he hit me with a stick.
Other times, he would vent his anger even though I had nothing to do with it, simply because something was wrong with him.”
So, wives and sons have had their share of trauma.
Everyone will have experienced the anger of Alain Delon.
With the exception, perhaps, of his daughter Anouchka.
Indeed, Alain Delon has always admitted to having treated his favorite better, without giving the reason, undoubtedly adding a little more to the resentment of others.
Alain Delon and his children in 30 photos
In images, in pictures
See the slideshow30 photos
See the slideshow30 photos