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Romy Schneider and Alain Delon: love, infidelity and an eternal complicity

2020-08-28T00:43:12.874Z


The actor couple only stayed together for five years, but their friendship lasted until the actress's suicide in 1982 after failing to overcome the loss of her son.


Sensuality overflowed the turquoise pool of the Côte d'Azur mansion where Romy Schneider and Alain Delon shot in the summer of 1968 the scenes of what would end up becoming a cult film in France , The Pool.By then, the intense love story that had brought together two of the most promising actors of their generation was long over. But something continued to flow between the two interpreters, as the director Jacques Deray happily observed. "I watch them and I know that luck has just smiled at me," he liked to remember. That complicity inherited from a mythical love that fascinated at a time when cinema was still a world of dreams and promises would never disappear. "Romy was the great love of my life, the first, the strongest, but also, unfortunately, the saddest," says Delon to this day.

And that at the beginning there was anything but attraction. "She is a very pretty girl, but very capricious and boring," Delon would say as soon as he met her. It was August 1958 and the two young actors - 19 years old her, 23 him - were getting ready to shoot their first film together, Christine . Despite her youth, Schneider was already famous thanks to films about the Austrian empress Sissi, which she detested. But the world had not yet discovered the handsome Delon, whom Schneider had chosen as a co-star for a simple photo. Christine's French producer , recalled Paris Match on the 60th anniversary of that mythical encounter, sent Delon to fetch Schneider from the Paris Orly airport with a bouquet. "You will go to her and offer her the flowers," he instructed. Schneider also did not know everything about that handsome man who was waiting for her. “The producers had organized a meeting with the press in the halls of the airfield. At the foot of the escalator, I discover a very handsome young guy, very well groomed, with a tie, impeccable in a very fashionable suit. It was Alain Delon ”, he would tell later. The coldness of the first meeting soon melted into a Franco-German passion that dazzled a Europe where the wounds of the Second World War had not yet fully healed.

The spark soon caught. “I went to Vienna, where we were shooting the film. And there I fell madly in love with you. And you fell in love with me, "recalled Delon in a posthumous letter after the death of the actress in 1982, at age 43. Young, beautiful and increasingly famous - Delon's career began to emerge and nothing would stop it now - settled in Paris, something that the German press did not forgive. In March 1959, the couple got engaged in the house of the actress's parents on Lake Lugano, Italy. But "the fiancées of Europe", as the press baptized them, will never marry.

Their passionate but stormy relationship - filming that kept them apart, alleged infidelities by a growing Delon - fades at the age of five. Legend has it that on his return to Paris after a stay in Hollywood, in December 1963, Schneider discovers a bouquet of Baccara roses (so intense red that it almost appears black) and a few short lines: “I have gone to Mexico with Nathalie. Thousand things. Alain ”. Somewhat later he receives a more complete letter - 15 pages long - in which Delon says goodbye with a little more elegance and explains his departure with which he will become his first wife and with whom he will have his first child, Anthony. “Reason forces me to say goodbye to you. We have lived our marriage before we were married. Our work took away all hope of survival (…) I give you back your freedom by leaving you my heart, ”Delon wrote. Although the actor would have denied that scene, it continues to be remembered when their relationship is evoked.

In any case, although the love ended, the friendship would not, and something stronger that makes Delon have evoked Schneider in almost every one of the interviews he has given since the death of the actress. Just a decade after their first meeting, when they both already have a child from different couples, Delon picks her up again at an airport to start another filming together, the mythical La Piscina, in which the French actor has imposed on Schneider, in that time almost forgotten by directors, like their counterpart. The film relaunches the career of the German woman although it does not rekindle the old love. In fact, soon after Delon left his wife to start a long and turbulent relationship with another actress, Mireille Darc, and during filming he apparently flirted with another co-star, a very young Jane Birkin, despite a jealous Serge Gainsbourg threatening to shoot. whoever approached her. But La Piscina does consolidate a love that will last until Schneider's tragic death 13 years later, on May 29, 1982, unable to overcome the death of his son David a year earlier in an accident.

Until today, Delon assures that he cannot see The Pool. "It's too painful to see Romy and Maurice (Ronet, the other protagonist) laughing out loud again." According to Vanity Fair, which did a long and intimate interview with him three years ago, Delon still keeps in the inside pocket of his jacket a photo he took of the actress, already dead, in his bed. On September 22, 2018, he appeared at the Le Figaro newsroom with an obituary for the following day. “Rosemarie Albach-Retty, Romy Schneider, would have turned 80 today. May those who loved you and who continue to love you have a thought for her. Thank you. Alain Delon ”.

Source: elparis

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