Alain Delon y Romy Schneider They were a couple from 1958 to 1963, until the Frenchman left her after leaving her a short note. The actor who died this Sunday at the age of 88 and the Austrian were two sexual and artistic symbols of the time. The actress who played Empress Sissi perhaps never got over the end of her love with the protagonist of The Leopard. On May 29, 1982, devastated by the death of her 13-year-old son, she left for good. She was 43 years old. After her death, Delon acknowledged that she was the love of his life. Delon and Schneider had met when Romy was 19 and Alain, 23. “I’m going to say goodbye to you, the longest farewell, my puppelé. That’s what I called you, “little doll”, in German”; this is what Delon wrote after Romy’s death.
Alain Delon y Romy Schneider They lived a mutual love, with the small exception that he was very womanizer. The young Austrian actress, who had just played the role of Empress Sissi, was the love of his life. It’s a shame that Delon didn’t understand this until after her death on May 29, 1982, at the age of 43, after a bout of depression and the death of her son. Romy was broke: her funeral was paid for by friends. Without an autopsy, it was not known whether it had been a heart attack or suicide. Her son David had died in an absurd accident: he had been impaled on the gate at the entrance to her house.
A quarter of a century before the tragedy, In August 1958, Delon and Schneider met at Orly Airport in Paris. She was already a star and had chosen him from a photo as her co-star for the film Christine. The film’s producer suggested that Delon welcome Romy at the airport with a bouquet of flowers. He had arranged a meeting with the press in a room. Schneider did not speak French and Delon did not speak German. Later, he would say: “She is a pretty girl, but capricious and boring.” To her, young Alain had seemed superb.
The passionate romance began and became unstoppable. It happened at the height of their professional career. They became cannon fodder for the gossip press. Romy and Alain were worthy of envy. They seemed to have it all: health (later displaced by fame as the first premise of happiness), money and love. Except for Schneider’s mother, Magda, an actress who had sympathised with Nazism and who predicted the worst for her daughter with Delon, the planets seemed aligned towards the wedding and a happy ending like a romantic movie.
In March 1959, despite Magda, Romy and Alain got engaged at the Schneider house, a mansion facing Lake Lugano in Italy. The media called them “the fiancés of Europe.” But the unforgettable party, the wedding, would be postponed. The filming immortalized and favored their reputation as sex symbols of their time. She, somewhat naive, declared: “I always risk everything. I give myself and love with all my heart.” Delon had the most elastic heart muscle or, on the contrary, the most hardened: he led at least a double life; some said he formed a triangle; others, all kinds of sentimental geometric figures.
But Delon was unfaithful to Schneider. We are not talking about a simple adventure. He told Romy about it in a letter he wrote in December 1963. It was not very subtle: more cruel than honest, without rhetorical beauty or elaborate reflections. Alain Delon, the unfaithful. Schneider read the heartbreaking message from the man she loved upon returning to Paris from Hollywood, along with a bouquet of roses: just nine words, including his name. “I went to Mexico with Nathalie. A thousand things. Alain.” Nathalie was Nathalie Barthélémy, whom Alain had met in a Parisian nightclub the previous year. Her real name was Francine Canovas; she had taken the surname of her first husband, Guy. In 1963, she became Nathalie Delon. Soon after, Alain explained to her that Nathalie was pregnant (in fact, they were to marry and their first child would be called Anthony): “Reason compels me to say goodbye to you. We lived our marriage before we got married. Our work robbed us of all hope of survival. I give you back your freedom by leaving you my heart.”
Broken, Schneider entered a period of drifting confusion, with excessive alcohol and pills. However, she continued her career: she worked with directors such as Claude Sautet, Claude Chabrol, Orson Welles and Luchino Visconti. In July 1966 she married German actor, director and theatre producer Harry Meyen, who had been held prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp: they had David at the end of that year. Meyen was to hang herself in 1974; David was to die in the fence accident. It is not uncommon for her mother to introduce herself in interviews as “Romy Schneider, an unhappy woman” or to say things like: “I’m nothing in life, I’m everything on the screen.”
The funny thing is that in the mid-60s she forgave Delon and they got back into their relationship, although in the form of friendshipIn 1966 they starred The pool, Jacques Deray’s film, a psychological drama of jealousy and eroticism. Delon played a writer, Schneider his girlfriend. In the beginning they were shown by a swimming pool and she asked him to scratch her back. He complied, but then threw her into the water. In a later sequence, he took a branch and whipped her hard. The film revived Romy’s career, but did not rekindle their love. They maintained a loving relationship, however.
Delon divorced Nathalie in 1969.. Afterwards (afterwards?) he had a myriad of romances with famous and non-famous women. He was already a movie star. His longest subsequent relationship was with the actress Mireille Darc, with whom he shared fifteen years, until Schneider’s death. “I’m a difficult man, I’m glad Mimi has been with me for so long,” he declared, more cocky than self-critical. In 1987 he began his last serious romance, with the Dutch writer, actress and model Rosalie Van Breemen, 31 years younger. They married and had two children: Anouchka, an actress and his father’s weakness, and Alain-Fabien.“I do three things very well: my job, nonsense and children,” Delon said.
Romy, obsessed with Delon but he, obsessed with her (even after death)
Beyond her many adventures, loves, passions and romances, children and Alain’s nonsense, Romy Schneider returned to him like an obsession. Delon wrote her letters again, longer, deeper, more romantic, but he did so after she had died. It would be more difficult to explain the photos that Delon took of her body. RomyAnd he began to carry them in his pocket ever since. Perhaps he would have them nearby this Sunday, August 18, when he died in Switzerland after requesting euthanasia.
The first paragraphs that Delon wrote after Schneider’s death are revealing: “I watch you sleep. I am with you, by your bed. You are wearing a long black robe and red embroidery on the bodice. These are flowers, I think, but I do not notice them. I am going to say goodbye to you, the longest farewell, my puppelé. I am not looking at the flowers, but at your face and I think you are beautiful. I also think that this is the first time in my life, and in yours, that I see you calm and peaceful. You are so quiet, you are so fine, how beautiful you are. It seems that a hand gently wiped your face of all tensions, of all the anxieties of misfortune.”
“I watch you sleep. They tell me you’re dead. I think of you, of me, of us. Am I guilty? We ask ourselves this question in front of a being who is loved and who still loves. These feelings fill you, and then they flow back, and then one tells oneself that one is not guilty, no, but one is responsible. I am. Because of me, your heart stopped beating the other night in Paris. Because of me, because I was there twenty-five years ago and had been chosen to be your partner in ‘Christine’. You came from Vienna and I waited for you in Paris, with a bouquet of flowers that I didn’t know how to hold. My God, we were young and we were happy, and at the end of the film I told you to come and live with me in France and you told me that you wanted to live by my side.”
This posthumous devotion, if you will, was confirmed only in 2009, when Delon said he had taken pictures of Schneider on her deathbed. He had gone to say goodbye to her with the filmmakers Claude Berri and Alain Terzian. “I took three photos of her with my Polaroid, because I wanted to capture the image of her coffin forever. I have kept these portraits that I never showed to anyone, I carry them in my wallet, close to my heart. Romy was the great love of my life“The first, the strongest, but also, unfortunately, the saddest,” he explained, causing the same stupor that he had caused Schneider – with whom he did not marry and had no children – in that farewell letter.
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