If the actor Alain Delon had not existed, it would have been necessary to create him. His death at the age of 88 brings not just a life to a close, but an era in both French cinema and public life that has no corresponding figures in it today, for good or ill. Delon was praised posthumously by none other than President Macron as ‘more than a star: a French monument’ This is accurate, suggesting that Macron is a surprisingly perceptive judge of cinematic achievement. American cinema had the likes of Henry Fonda and John Wayne, the square-jawed epitome of righteousness and courage; France had Delon, a strikingly good-looking lounge lizard, who was capable of everything from astonishing thespian prowess to equally astonishingly awful off-screen behaviour.

Macron nailed it when he referred to Delon as ‘mélancolique, populaire, secret’. There was something unknowable behind those glinting, feline eyes, more than a hint of menace beneath the purring charm. Undoubtedly this was what attracted legions of women to him on and off-screen, as well, it is suggested, some men as well. He revelled in this ambiguity. When he was asked whether he had an affair with Luchino Visconti, who directed him in many of his finest films – including Rocco and his Brothers and The Leopard – he simply purred ‘So what’s wrong if I had?’ Would I be guilty of something? If I like it I’ll do it. The only important thing is to love.’

Delon began his screen career in the late 1950s, after serving in the Indochina War and following a brief time spent as a pimp in Pigalle. His good looks and charm drew him to the attention of the talent scout Henry Willson, a powerful homosexual agent who was responsible for the careers of such figures as Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter, but Delon was uninterested in a Hollywood career. After he made his debut as a leading man in the forgettable romantic comedy Women Are Weak – which he might have adopted as a maxim for life – he had an astonishing run of form throughout the 1960s that included everything from his chillingly blank performance as Tom Ripley in René Clément’s Patricia Highsmith adaptation Plein Soleil to his unforgettable appearance in Jean-Pierre Melville’s film noir Le Samouraï as Costello, a hitman trying to find out who ordered his murder and why.

Delon’s costume, of a trench coat and fedora, was so influential that not only did it inspire a thousand bedsit existentialists on both sides of the Channel, and beyond, but countless directors, from John Woo to David Fincher, have had their own crack at pictures about nerveless, suave assassins who operate by their own moral code, which has remarkably little to do with the law. Delon himself, who continued to work with many of Europe’s finest filmmakers, established himself as a lone wolf; an actor who would turn up, give a remarkable performance on screen, and then disappear off into a mysterious but glamorous existence that was eagerly documented in the press, and its less seemly aspects largely ignored.

As an actor, Delon was peerless. As a man, he was severely lacking in the qualities that human beings need in order to be happy. Although he immodestly declared to GQ that ‘I was very, very, very, very handsome indeed… women were all obsessed with me, from when I was 18 till when I was 50’, his many love affairs were conducted with a mechanical soullessness that saw him seduce the most desirable women of his generation – from Jane Fonda and Nico to Romy Schneider and, apparently, Brigitte Bardot, although she coyly suggested that theirs had been a long platonic friendship rather than a romance – but seem to take very little pleasure in the act. He remarked in a 2015 documentary that ‘loneliness is part of my life. I live well with it’. When he died, he was estranged from his three acknowledged sons – there was at least one more, Ari, from his relationship with Nico – and the only member of his family who still had any relationship with him was his daughter Anouchka, who remained loyal to him to the end. She said of him ‘My father’s career has been extraordinary. Nobody else has achieved what he has achieved.’

She may well be right, but Delon’s peerless on-screen achievements must be measured against his less savoury off-screen antics, too. He hurt many of the women he professed to adore, physically and emotionally; his long-term partner Rosalie van Breemen said that he broke several of her ribs, which he denied, although he admitted to ‘giving her a slap’. Then there are the connections with organised crime. In 1968, the corpse of his bodyguard Stevan Marković was found, along with a letter to his brother in which Marković wrote: ‘If I get killed, it’s 100 per cent the fault of Alain Delon and his godfather Francois Marcantoni.’ Like the similarly-implicated Frank Sinatra, Delon’s political connections were such that any criminal investigation disappeared almost overnight, not least because he was rumoured to have incriminating photographs of the politician Georges Pompidou’s wife Claude in his possession.

He was said to have right-wing, even far right political sympathies, and was friends with the National Front’s former leader Jean-Marie le Pen, although he always described himself as a devoted admirer of Charles de Gaulle and vacillated about his opinions, praising the National Front in one interview as ‘very important’, only to deny ever voting for them in a subsequent conversation. Yet French heroes have never been notable for their consistency. Like the musician Serge Gainsbourg, who Delon resembled in his womanising, if not in his rather better looks and less dissolute lifestyle, the actor was so beloved by those around him that he was able to get away with behaviour that lesser, or less fortunate, people could only have dreamt of aspiring to.

Delon was himself a fantastical creation, a nation’s dreams and fantasies made flesh. Appropriately, his greatest performances – whether as Ripley, Costello or his Cesar-award winning role as the ambiguous art dealer Monsieur Klein in Joseph Losey’s eponymous picture – have an intentionally opaque quality to them, often helped by the sparse dialogue that directors gave him. He made occasional, half-hearted attempts to break into English-language cinema, but he was too fascinating and unorthodox an actor to play cookie-cooker villains, and Hollywood has never coped very well with French actors in leading roles: witness the way Gérard Depardieu was forced into buffoonish comic relief character parts almost immediately when he began working in English-language cinema.

Delon did little of worth or note in the final decades of his career. He was embroiled in spats with his family and suffered the legal troubles and press bother that a wealthy, powerful and not especially nice man can usually expect later in life. Yet oddly enough, he managed one final iconic appearance as – naturally- Caesar in the otherwise undistinguished Asterix at the Olympic Games. The role is not a demanding one, somewhere between comic relief antagonist and special guest star, but in a minute-long monologue that Delon delivers to camera, alluding to his past successes and boasting of his greatness (‘The César for Best Emperor was awarded to Caesar!’) there is still the old fire and magic to be found, those inimitable eyes glinting with life and danger. He may only have played an emperor, but as he goes to his eternal rest, Delon must have known that his legacy – for good and ill – would be a truly imperial one: a life lived on a scale that mere mortals could barely begin to comprehend.