New Book Reveals Troubling Truths About Alain Delon: ‘The Most Beautiful Man’ Was Also Abusive

The ‘ice cold angel’ of the golden age of French cinema, Alain Delon’s mesmerising sex appeal was always tinged with a hint of danger.

Dishonourably discharged from the French Navy after a tour of duty in Indochina, and caught up in a gangsters-and-orgies scandal in 1968, no one doubted that the man who memorably unzipped Marianne Faithfull’s motorbike leathers with his teeth was a fighter as well as a lover.

But in a sensational new book just published in France, Delon’s youngest child, Alain-Fabien Delon, accuses his father of being a wife beater and a violent, unpredictable man obsessed with guns who would – even into his dotage – insist on sleeping with a loaded pistol under his pillow.

Alain-Fabien says his father nearly beat his last girlfriend, Hiromi Rollin, to death twice, roughed her up ‘more times than I can count’ and pointed a gun at the back of her neck, saying ‘I’m going to kill you’.

He further accuses his father of breaking eight of his own mother, the Dutch model Rosalie van Breemen’s, ribs and breaking her nose twice during their 14-year relationship.

Alain-Fabien, a model, who, just like his father, works as a brand ambassador for Dior, recalls how he was once locked overnight in a cage with the dogs to ‘toughen him up’.

Alain Delon’s (above) youngest child, Alain-Fabien Delon, in his new book accuses his father of being a wife beater and a violent, unpredictable man obsessed with guns

The shocking revelations are contained in the book, The Last Days Of The Samurai, written by French investigative journalists Laurence Pieau and Francois Vignolle.

They have pieced together the final months in the life of Delon, often referred to as ‘the most beautiful man in cinema’, who died of blood cancer aged 88 in August 2024. The story is one of paranoia as his three children, bodyguards and mistress conspired against each other behind the wrought iron gates of his estate, Chateau de la Brulerie, in Douchy, south of Paris.

In truth, for many years there have been suspicions that this icon of French cinema was really a monster and the book certainly suggests this is the truth.

Raised by foster parents who died in a car accident, and then returned to his mother and his hated stepfather, Delon rose to international fame in the 1960s with films such as Plein Soleil in 1960 and The Leopard in 1963, in which he starred opposite Claudia Cardinale.

A prolific womaniser, Delon’s past lovers were said to have included women from Jane Fonda to Brigitte Bardot, although he married only once.

Off screen, Delon proved just as adept at making money, building a £42 million fortune via business and property ventures, including a football club, restaurants and a sunglasses line, which was popular in Asia. For decades Delon also had Swiss residency, allowing his earnings to flow in free of tax.

In 1968 he was embroiled in a gangland scandal after the death of his close friend and one-time bodyguard Stevan Markovic, whose corpse was found dumped in a skip on the outskirts of Paris.

The theory was that he’d been ‘rubbed out’ after staging an orgy at Delon’s house, which he recorded on a hidden camera. The footage was said to have captured images of future French President Georges Pompidou’s wife, Claude, and the chief murder suspect was Corsican crime boss, Francois Marcantoni.

Delon denied any involvement in events but was said to have been a frequent participant at Markovic’s orgies. He went on to have a son Anthony, now 60, with actress Nathalie Delon (his only wife), and Alain-Fabien, 31, and daughter Anouchka, 34, with Rosalie van Breemen. There was another son, Christian Aaron Boulogne, known as Ari, whose mother was the German actress and singer Nico.

Delon always denied paternity, despite Ari being adopted and raised by Delon’s mother and stepfather as Nico battled addiction. Ari died of a drug overdose in 2023, still waiting for Delon to recognise him as his son.

Growing up, Alain-Fabien recalls ‘extreme domestic tension’ between his parents, who were together from 1987 to 2001. ‘He smashed my mother’s head in. He broke her nose twice, he broke her ribs, he broke eight of her ribs,’ he says.

Tellingly, when asked in 2019 on French television about rumours of domestic violence, Delon shrugged: ‘If a slap is macho, then I am macho.’

Alain-Fabien also describes the intense cruelty Delon displayed towards Rollin, 67, a Japaneseborn cinema worker, who’d lived part-time with Delon as his assistant and carer for around 17 years but always maintained they were lovers. ‘I can’t count the number of times he beat Hiromi up,’ Alain-Fabien told the authors.

Other accounts of the domestic violence are even more explicit. In the book, a friend of Rollin’s says she saw her ‘with black eyes and bruises’, and that ‘one day she had finger marks across her face’.

A police statement from Rollin herself states that she was ‘kicked many times’ by Delon, and that the actor had even strangled her and threatened her with a gun.

The drama and cruelty in the Delon family did not end as their father’s health failed – he had a stroke in 2019 leaving him in need of constant care. In July 2023, Rollin was evicted from the Douchy estate by Delon’s children. She complained to police that all her belongings were burned.

The book, The Last Days Of The Samurai, was written by French investigative journalists Laurence Pieau and Francois Vignolle. Delon pictured in the 1969 film La Piscine

Meanwhile, the estate turned into a ‘nest of spies’, the book claims, as the children fought furiously over his legacy. Alain-Fabien moved into the Douchy house to watch over his father for more than a year, while Anthony visited weekly, along with Anouchka.

In January 2024, Anthony gave an interview to Paris Match magazine, accusing his half-sister Anouchka of ‘lying and manipulation’ and hiding results of Delon’s cognitive tests.

Anouchka hit back, with a legal statement saying her father ‘could no longer endure the aggressivity [sic] of his son, who is constantly telling him he is senile’.

Alain-Fabien reacted by publishing on Instgram a secret recording of Anouchka making sly insinuations about her half-brother to their father.

A bodyguard who had coffee with Alain Delon every day told the authors: ‘[the soap opera] Dallas is a joke in comparison.’

Alain-Fabien is the only one of the three to publicly recognise Rollin as their father’s lover – which may come too late for the woman who had stayed steadfastly by Delon’s side, despite appalling treatment.

He says ‘Anthony, with his kind of oversized ego, didn’t want to accept the fact our father had another woman. We could have avoided a lot of problems and also a lot of unspoken things.

‘There was a very difficult relationship with Anouchka because there was an obvious Oedipal complex… my father always tried to hide from [her] what we all knew: Hiromi was his woman. They lived together.

‘She was my father’s partner. Period. I grew up with Hiromi. She was always there. Always!’

Rollin said she first met Delon in December 1989, when she was second assistant director on his film, Dancing Machine. ‘I immediately felt a spark between us,’ she recalled, and moved in to his estate at Douchy in 2006.

That the family refused to see her as anything more than his carer, however, angered her intensely. ‘It’s despicable, it’s a pure invention,’ she fumed. ‘We behaved like a normal couple. We kissed, the children saw it, they knew very well that, until Alain’s stroke, we shared the same bed.’

Another sinister aspect of Delon’s final years, described in the book, was his obsession with building an armoury of weapons at Douchy. During a raid in February 2024, gendarmes seized 72 firearms and more than 3,000 rounds of ammunition – all of it illegally held. Delon even kept a loaded pistol in his bed.

Alain-Fabien told the authors he was particularly concerned about the gun and removed the bullets, before Anthony put them back in, telling him: ‘Don’t worry, he’s not going to kill himself.’ But Alain-Fabien recalled an evening in 2023 when he went out to buy a kebab accompanied by a bodyguard, and his ageing father pointed a pistol at him upon his return.

From then on, Alain-Fabien tried to place fake bullets in gun barrels, without telling his father.

‘Until the end, he honestly believed the gun he slept with was loaded,’ he confided.

In turn, Hiromi Rollin said she moved into a spare room after a gun accidentally went off and a bullet went through Delon’s pillow, before embedding itself in the wall.

Then, of course, there’s Delon’s £42 million legacy – which no doubt will be the subject of multiple lawsuits in ensuing years.

Anouchka’s lawyer, Frank Berton, claimed to the authors that his client’s brothers would not contest a will giving them 25 per cent each of their father’s fortune – compared to her 50 per cent.

Also wading into the saga are Charles and Blanche, the two children of Ari Boulogne. They want a genetic test that could prove they are the star’s biological grandchildren.

As for Rollin, she still hopes to benefit from the estate. A source close to her told the Daily Mail: ‘She was devastated about being kicked out of the home she shared with Alain Delon, and being told she would never see him again. Nothing has been put right and she remains in a terrible state.’

She is clinging on to a ray of hope presented by Alain-Fabien’s acknowledgment of her as his father’s partner. But the death of the actor, once said to be Europe’s answer to James Dean, has exposed a series of sad and complicated truths about this French icon.

When Delon died, there was national mourning. French President Emmanuel Macron said: ‘Melancholic, popular, secretive, he was more than a star – he was a French monument.’

Cosmetics and fashion giant Dior celebrated an actor who had advertised their male fragrance, Eau Sauvage, as ‘a symbol of eternal masculinity’. While Brigitte Bardot – like Delon, part of the post-war generation of Gallic actors who made their country sexy, youthful and cool – said: ‘Alain, in dying, brings to an end the magnificent chapter of a bygone era of which he was a sovereign monument.’

But who would celebrate him now?