Alain Delon will be buried in the grounds of his country home on Saturday in “the strictest privacy” according to the wishes of his three children.
A carefully selected group of 40 mourners have been invited to the ceremony and instructed not to take pictures.
The French actor, who died on Sunday at the age of 88, had specifically requested there be no national homage, insisting he wanted to be buried “like anyone else”.
After obtaining special permission from the local prefect, he will be interred in the chapel he had built at La Brûlerie, the property at Douchy in the Loiret, 85 miles south-east of Paris, which he bought in the 1970s and where he died. The chapel is in a cemetery on the almost 120 hectare (300 acre) estate, much of which is woodland, where Delon buried at least 35 of his pet dogs.
Delon had requested that his “end of life” companion, a Belgian malinois called Loubo, be buried with him. After protests from animal rights campaigners, the actor’s three children Anthony, 59, Anouchka, 33, and Alain-Fabien, 30, agreed to keep the dog in the family.
It is unclear who will keep Loubo or where; the three have been involved in a bitter public squabble over their father in recent months.
Delon had also requested a funeral mass conducted by the Catholic priest Monsignor Jean-Michel Di Falco, 82, the former bishop of Gap in south-east France and a longstanding friend of the actor. Di Falco oversaw the 2017 funeral of the actor Mireille Darc, Delon’s companion between 1968 and 1983 and the woman he described as “the love of my life”, as well as the musician and singer Charles Trenet and the French business tycoon Jean-Luc Lagardère. He also assisted at the funeral of the former president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 2020.
Mourners have reportedly been asked to seal their mobile phones in plastic bags during the ceremony and told there should be no pictures taken. The local prefecture has banned aircraft and drones from flying over the property.
Identified with French cinema’s resurgence in the 1960s, Delon starred in a string of classic films such as Plein Soleil, Le Samouraï and Rocco and His Brothers. Once a familiar face in Douchy, he had not been seen in the village for several years after he suffered a stroke in 2019 and was diagnosed with a slow-developing lymphoma in 2022.
