Day: August 18, 2024

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paris — French actor Alain Delon, who melted the hearts of millions of film fans whether playing a murderer, hoodlum or hitman in his postwar heyday, has died, French media reported on Sunday. He was 88.

Delon had been in poor health since suffering a stroke in 2019, rarely leaving his estate in Douchy, in France’s Val de Loire region.

With his striking blue eyes, Delon was sometimes referred to as the “French Frank Sinatra” for his handsome looks, a comparison Delon disliked. Unlike Sinatra, who always denied connections with the Mafia, Delon openly acknowledged his shady pals in the underworld.

In a 1970 interview with The New York Times, Delon was asked about such acquaintances, one of whom was among the last “Godfathers” of the underworld in the Mediterranean port of Marseille.

“Most of them, the gangsters I know … were my friends before I became an actor,” he said. “I don’t worry about what a friend does. Each is responsible for his own act. It doesn’t matter what he does.”

Delon shot to fame in two films by Italian director Luchino Visconti, Rocco and His Brothers in 1960 and The Leopard in 1963.

He starred alongside venerable French elder Jean Gabin in Henri Verneuil’s 1963 film Melodie en Sous-Sol (Any Number Can Win) and was a major hit in Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 Le Samourai (The Godson). The role of a philosophical contract killer involved minimal dialogue and frequent solo scenes, and Delon shone.

Delon became a star in France and was idolized by men and women in Japan, but never made it as big in Hollywood despite performing with American cinema giants, including Burt Lancaster when the Frenchman played apprentice-hitman Scorpio in the eponymous 1973 film.

In the 1970 film Borsalino, he starred with fellow French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, playing gangsters who come to blows in an unforgettable, stylized fight over a woman.

Crowning moments also included 1969 erotic thriller La Piscine (The Swimming Pool), where Delon paired up with real-life lover Romy Schneider, in a sultry French Riviera saga of jealousy and seduction.

Troubled man

Born just outside Paris on November 8, 1935, Delon started life on the back foot: he was put in foster care at age 4 after his parents divorced.

He ran away from home at least once and was expelled several times from boarding schools before joining the marines at 17 and serving in then-French-ruled Indochina. There, too, he got into trouble over a stolen jeep.

Back in France in the mid-50s, he worked as a porter at the Paris wholesale food market Les Halles and spent time in the red-light Pigalle district before migrating to the cafes of the bohemian St. Germain des Pres area.

There he met French actor Jean-Claude Brialy, who took him to the Cannes Film Festival, where he attracted the attention of an American talent scout who arranged a screen test.

He made his film debut in 1957 in Quand la femme s’en mele (Send a Woman When the Devil Fails).

Sulphurous friends

Delon was a businessman as well as an actor, leveraging his looks to sell branded cosmetics and dabbling in racehorses with old underworld friends. He invested in a racehorse stable with Jacky “Le Mat” Imbert, a notorious figure in a thriving Marseille crime scene.

Delon’s more louche friendships exploded to the surface when a former bodyguard-cum-confidant, a young Yugoslav called Stefan Markovic, was found dead in a bag, with a bullet in his head, discarded in a rubbish dump near Paris.

The actor was interrogated and cleared by police but the “Markovic Affair” snowballed into a national scandal.

The man police charged with the Markovic murder — he was later acquitted — was Francois Marcantoni, a Corsican cafe owner and friend of Delon who thrived in the hustle and bustle of the Pigalle district in the aftermath of World War II.

Outspoken

Delon was outspoken offstage and courted controversy when he did so — notably when he said he regretted the abolition of the death penalty and spoke disparagingly of gay marriage, which was legalized in France in 2013.

He publicly defended the far-right National Front and telephoned its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, an old friend, to congratulate him when the party did well in local elections in 2014.

Delon’s lovers included Schneider and German model-turned-singer Nico, with whom he had a son. In 1964, he married Nathalie Barthelemy and fathered a second son before ending the marriage and embarking on a 15-year relationship with Mireille Darc. He had two more children with Dutch model Rosalie van Breemen.

In a January 2018 interview, Delon told Paris Match he was fed up with modern life and had a chapel and tomb ready for him on the grounds of his home near Geneva, and for his Belgian shepherd dog, called Loubo.

“If I die before him, I’ll ask the vet to let us go together. He will give the dog an injection so he can die in my arms.”

Delon’s last major public appearance was to receive an honorary Palme d’or at the Cannes film festival in May 2019.

In his last years, Delon was the center of a family feud over his care, which made headlines in French media.

In April 2024 a judge placed Delon under “reinforced curatorship,” meaning he no longer had full freedom to manage his assets. He was already under legal protection over concerns over his health and well-being.
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ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia — With its reindeer sleigh rides, camel racing and stunning landscapes with room to roam, Mongolia is hoping to woo visitors who are truly looking to get away from it all.

Like most countries, its tourism industry was devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and it has launched a “Welcome to MonGOlia” campaign to win people back. The government has added flights and streamlined the visa process, offering visa-free visits for many countries.

At least 437,000 foreign tourists visited in the first seven months of this year, up 25% over the same period last year, including increasing numbers from Europe, the U.S. and Japan. Visitors from South Korea nearly doubled, thanks in part to the under-four-hour flight.

Despite the gains, Mongolia’s government is still short of its goal of 1 million visitors per year from 2023-25 to the land of Genghis Khan, which encompassed much of Eurasia in its 13th-century heyday and is now a landlocked nation located between Russia and China.

With a population of 3.3 million people, about half of them living in the capital, Ulaanbaatar, there’s plenty of open space for the adventure tourist to explore, said Egjimaa Battsooj, who works for a tour company. Its customized itineraries include horseback trips and camping excursions with the possibility of staying in gers, the felt-covered dwellings still used by Mongolia’s herders.

There’s little chance of running across private property, so few places are off-limits, she said.

“You don’t need to open a gate, you don’t need to have permission from anyone,” she said, sitting in front of a map of Mongolia with routes marked out with pins and strands of yarn.

“We are kind of like the last truly nomad culture on the whole planet,” she added.

Lonely Planet named Mongolia its top destination in its Best in Travel 2024 report. The pope’s visit to Mongolia last year also helped focus attention on the country. Its breakdancers became stars at last year’s Asian Games. And some local bands have developed a global following, like The Hu, a folk-metal band that incorporates traditional Mongolian instruments and throat singing with modern rock.

Still, many people know little about Mongolia. American tourist Michael John said he knew some of the history about Genghis Khan and had seen a documentary on eagles used by hunters before deciding to stop in Ulaanbaatar as part of a longer vacation.

“It was a great opportunity to learn more,” the 40-year-old said.

Tourism accounted for 7.2% of Mongolia’s gross domestic product and 7.6% of its employment in 2019 before collapsing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the World Bank. But the organization noted “substantial growth potential” for Mongolia to exploit, with “diverse nature and stunning sceneries” and sports and adventure tourism possibilities.

Mongolia tourism ads focus on those themes, with beautiful views of frozen lakes in winter for skating and fishing, the Northern Lights and events like reindeer sledding and riding, camel racing and hiking.

Munkhjargal Dayan offers rides on two-humped Bactrian camels, traditional archery and the opportunity to have eagles trained for hunting perch on a visitor’s arm.

“We want to show tourists coming from other countries that we have such a way of life in Mongolia,” he said, waiting for customers by a giant statue of Genghis Kahn on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar.

Outside the lively capital, getting around can be difficult in summer as the steppes become waterlogged, and there is limited infrastructure, a shortage of accommodation and a deficit of skilled labor in tourism destinations.

It is also easy for foreigners to get lost, with few signs in English, said Dutch tourist Jasper Koning. Nevertheless, he said he was thoroughly enjoying his trip.

“The weather is super, the scenery is more than super, it’s clean, the people are friendly,” he said.
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