“He respected himself and he expected to be respected,” emphasizes Gilles Jacob, former president of the Cannes Film Festival.

Gilles Jacob looks back on the strong character of the actor, who died on Sunday at the age of 88. The two shared many moments together at the Cannes Film Festival.

“He respected himself and he expected to be respected.”underlines Gilles Jacob, former president of the Cannes Film Festival from 2001 to 2014. He was interviewed on the morning of Sunday, August 18 on franceinfo, after the announcement of the death of Alain Delon, an actor he knew well and whom he met on many occasions at the film festival. Beyond the memories, Gilles Jacob believes that the death of the actor “It’s a relief for him, because his illness was awful, it’s the only thing in his life he couldn’t control.” “I’m sure he’s better off wherever he is.”he adds.

franceinfo: Alain Delon was a huge actor with a hundred films to his credit, but did he also play a character in his daily life?

Gilles Jacob: He knew very well what he represented. What he represented was the Delon brand and it had to be taken seriously. When my phone rang, he would just say “It’s Alain”in a low voice. There are many ‘Alains’ in the cinema, but if he felt that he had not been recognized right away, he would hang up. That is to say that he respected himself and he expected to be respected. It is not at all like Belmondo, Belmondo, he was a brother. Delon identified himself respectfully with Delon. With him, we will have been a cop, a gangster, a killer, a hunted man, a professor, a lover of sublime creatures, we will have played incredible roles that will remain in the history of cinema, we will have frequented genius directors, we will have lived extraordinary lives, we will have smiled, we will have lived.

What you describe is also what made part of his legend, an unpleasant, self-centered, self-loving character?

He is not an unsympathetic character, he is a character who wanted to be taken seriously. I remember one time, I will tell you an anecdote, he came to Cannes. As always, a car is sent to the airport in Nice, but for some reason, the car was not there. So Delon was waiting on the sidewalk with his little suitcase, and fortunately, another driver came by and took him. In the car, he was furious, he said: “Take me to Jacob directly, he’ll see what Alain Delon is.” Of course I apologized profusely, even though it wasn’t my fault, but he never came back except by his own means. He took a helicopter and he never wanted to depend on the festival again.

Alain Delon said that he had never acted in his life, that he lived his roles, is that how he was able to become the great actor that he was?

It’s true that we do a lot of ourselves, but he was very observant. He understood that you had to move very little, that you shouldn’t fidget. He was someone extremely sober, a majesty, a big wild animal in reality who moved in the cinema like wild animals in Africa and who managed to dominate everyone. At a certain point, when he considered that the director was not very competent, he took over the staging himself. It’s not what he succeeded in doing best, because he had a sober, classic staging. No, what he was, was an incredible character who played a hundred different roles, but he arrived each time with his own suitcases, that is to say with this vivacity, this sobriety, this class.