For a brief moment, they had it all. But in 1964, after four years together—documented in endless tabloid coverage—golden couple Romy Schneider and Alain Delon split. Delon ended things with a note, a few scribbled lines that closed the door on what had been a fairytale romance to rival anything the actors had portrayed on screen.
Born on September 23, 1938, in post-Anschluss Vienna, Schneider—whose parents were both actors—attended boarding school, where she showed a natural talent for painting. Still, her mother, Magda, directed her striking daughter towards a career in film. Almost always flanked on set by her mother, Schneider was just 15 when she made her screen debut, in When the White Lilacs Bloom Again (1953).
In 1955, she was cast as Empress Elisabeth of Austria in Sissi, the first installment of a trilogy that brought her immense popularity, but also pigeonholed her somewhat. After a series of sentimental movies in which she typically played the innocent ingenue, Schneider was desperate to change course.
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Alain Delon was born in the French town of Sceaux on November 8, 1935. His childhood was not easy: He was just four years old when his parents divorced and his father, Fabien, disappeared from his life for several years. His mother, Edith, entrusted him to the care of a foster family ,where he remained until he was eight; at which point he moved to a boarding school run by nuns in Issy-les-Moulineaux. Angry at the world and rebellious by nature, he went from one school to another until, at 14, he quit school to work in a butcher’s shop.
After enlisting in the Navy at 17, Delon returned to France in 1956 and found work as a porter, clerk, and waiter in Montmartre and Halles. He befriended the actor Jean-Claude Brialy, who took Delon to the Cannes Film Festival, where his charisma and James Dean-esque good looks caught the attention of a 20th Century Fox producer. “I soon realized that women were crazy about me,” Delon wrote in his 2011 memoir, Les Femmes de ma Vie. “It was they, the women, who pushed me to do this job.”
It was the film Christine (1958) that brought Schneider and Delon together. Directed by Pierre Gaspard-Huit and based on a play by Arthur Schnitzler, it represented a turning point in Schneider’s career, who was tired of being known only as Sissi, and the first major test for Delon. Despite their initial mutual distrust, the meeting proved fateful.
Schneider initially described Delon in her diaries as “too handsome, too young, too coiffed,” but their attraction was undeniable. As Delon himself would recall years later: “You were arriving from Vienna and I was waiting for you at the Paris airport with a bouquet of flowers that I didn’t know how to hold. But the producers had told me: ‘As soon as she comes down the runway go to her and hand her the flowers.’ I waited with the flowers in my hand like an imbecile, amidst a horde of photographers. You got off the airplane, I approached. You said to your mother, ‘That must be Alain Delon, my partner!’ Nothing else, no bolt of lightning out of the blue. So I went to Vienna, where the film was being shot, and it was there that I fell madly in love with you. And you fell in love with me.”