Tributes have started to pour in for French cinema icon Alain Delon, who passed away at the age of 88 on Sunday.

French president Emmanuel Macron led the long line of tributes by calling the late actor a French monument. “Mr. Klein or Rocco, the Leopard or the Samurai, Alain Delon has played legendary roles and made the world dream. Lending his unforgettable face to shake up our lives. Melancholic, popular, secretive, he was more than a star: a French monument,” he wrote on X on Sunday.

Delon, a luminary of the golden age of French cinema, was celebrated for his roles in films like The Samurai and Borsalino. Over his career, he starred in nearly 90 films. His final significant public appearance was in May 2019, when he received an honorary Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

In a statement to AFP, veteran French actress Brigitte Bardot praised Delon as the embodiment of France’s “prestige cinema”, describing him as “an ambassador of elegance, talent, and beauty.”

Gilles Jacob, former president of the Cannes Festival, remembered Delon as “a lion... an actor with a steely gaze.”

In a statement on X, the Cannes Film Festival hailed Delon as an actor who “embodied French cinema far beyond its borders”. “He was the image of the triumphant thirty glorious years, he was one of those personalities who spoke to both the general public and specialists, working for commercial cinema as well as for auteur cinema,” the organisers wrote on the official handle of the festival.

The Venice Film Festival also paid tribute to Delon with a photo of the premiere of Roco And His Brothers at the festival in 1960.