Today, Anthony Delon is a peaceful man, but for a long time, the famous comedian resented his father for his unhappy childhood made of abandonment and violence. By his own admission, in his autobiography Between dog and wolf published by Cherche-Midi editions which will be adapted into a series, Anthony Delon says he spent more time with the nanny than with his parents Alain Delon and Nathalie Delon (who died in January 2021 of pancreatic cancer). Traumas that will never go away but that he can now live with without tormenting himself.
“It is the story of a man who managed to heal wounds that prevented him from living. Just as my mother and my father had the feeling of being abandoned by their parents, I too suffered from this feeling, very strong“, explains Anthony Delon in an interview granted to the Parisian, about his book. With his autobiography, he wishes to pay tribute to those who helped him overcome this difficult childhood – his godfather Georges Beaume (star agent), and his godmother Loulou, both deceased – but also to address “a message of love“to his father.
Anthony Delon has always had admiration for him, along with anger, now gone. A mixture of feelings that led him to road trips and even to prison, where he stayed for a month at the age of 18.
We all need to symbolically ‘kill’ our parents
At that time (February 1983), when he had been kicked out of the house by his father, Sveva Alviti’s companion was arrested at the wheel of a stolen BMW, with a Mac 50 under the driver’s seat, the weapon service stolen from a gendarme during the escape of Bruno Sulak, a friend and thug, who was nicknamed the “gentleman burglar”. Anthony Delon spent a month in the center for minors in Bois d’Arcy prison. “There was in me a very strong desire for life and a desire for death which came to overlap. We all need to ‘kill’ our parents symbolically: this bullshit was a way perhaps of doing in life what my father did on screen, explains Anthony Delon at Parisian. But when I got out of prison, I was like, ‘You’ve got better things to do.‘”
This passage in prison, Anthony Delon had already spoken about it in his previous autobiography, The first linkreleased in 2008. He notably remembered his dad’s visits to the visiting room: “I felt like I was in a Jean-Pierre Melville thriller. At each silence, I expected him to say to me: Be ready, tomorrow 4 p.m., during the walk, east wall of the courtyard, a helicopter will come and snatch you away… I’ll take care of everything.“Except that his month in prison, Anthony Delon did it in the rules of the art without any escape.