Film legend Delon says he's ready to die

Veteran French film star Alain Delon said Thursday that he was so sick of the world he would be happy to die now -- but he wants his dog to go with him.

"I hate the times that we live in, it makes me vomit," said the 82-year-old actor, one of the handsomest men ever to grace the silver screen.

"There are people that I hate. Everything is false, and only money counts. I will leave this world without regret," he told Paris Match magazine in a frank, tell-all interview in which he admitted to not being much of a father to his children, one of whom he still refuses to recognise.

Delon, who lives alone outside Paris, said he wants his two-year-old Belgian Shepherd dog, Loubo, to die with him.

"If I go before him I will ask the vet for us to go together. He will inject him so he can die in my arms.

"I would prefer that rather than leaving him to die of grief on my tomb," said the star of such classics as Visconti's "The Leopard", "The Samurai" and "Purple Noon", which was later remade as the "Talented Mr Ripley".

Yet Delon did not rule out making room for the right woman to shares his last days.

He said there were about 10 candidates, "but for now none are quite right."

He added he might even consider breaking his vow to never remarry if the right woman "was ready to accompany me to the end."

The actor, who made his name playing pretty boy killers and cads, talked of his fear that he might be dug up after his death for DNA for a paternity test.

- 'Don't dig me up' -

"I've told my daughter, 'Please don't let that happen to me when I'm dead'," he said

Delon has long denied he fathered a son with Nico, the late German pop star and muse of Andy Warhol.

However, Delon's mother later adopted the boy, making him his half-brother.

Yet Delon's own miserable childhood badly marked him, he told the magazine. "My parents got rid of me when I was four. I found myself with a foster family like an orphan."

"Both of them came running back to me when I was famous. All of a sudden they remembered they had a son," he said bitterly.

Nor has he forgiven them for signing his army papers so he could be thrown into the bloody Indochina War at 17. "It was them getting rid of me a second time," he said.

Delon put down his tumultuous love life and much of his woes with women to being abandoned.

"You cannot get back the love that wasn't given to me as a child. These are holes that can never be filled. Even when I love a woman, I feel alone. I was only four when I understood that those you love the most can abandon you."

The tell-all interview, over oysters, was conducted by Valerie Trierweiler, the estranged partner of former French president Francois Hollande.

She effectively torpedoed his presidency with a bestselling account of their relationship, "Thank You For This Moment", after he left her for an actress.

The journalist recently denied that she and Delon were an item.

- 'Few men loved like me' -

The actor admitted that he had not always been the perfect gentleman.

"I am like that, I do stupid things. I have been in prison. I was a little thug. All I had was my face," he said.

Yet women have always fallen at his feet, even as a baby, he said. "My mother had to put a sign on my pram, 'You can look, but you can't touch!'"

"I have been loved all my life," he said, particularly by the German actress Romy Schneider and Mireille Darc, who died last year.

"Very few men have been loved like me."

But Delon said he never slept with Brigitte Bardot, who was the Venus to his Apollo in French cinema of the 1960s.

"Strange though it may seem... given the torrid scenes we did, we were only friends, but good friends," he told Paris Match of the actress, who like him has been a vocal supporter of the far-right National Front party.

"I really like her and we share a passion for animals. If she had not her great love of animals I am sure she would have killed herself by now, like so many other great sex symbols. It is very hard for a woman to no longer see desire in men's eyes."

Source: AFP