Nathalie Delon

Francine Canovas was born on 1 August 1941 in Oujda, then under the French Protectorate in Morocco to a French family of Italian-Spanish origin. She was the daughter of Louis Canovas (1915–2003), pied-noir of Oran (Algeria), manager of a transport company in Morocco, who abandoned the family when she was 8 months old in 1942 and Antoinette Rodriguez, who was from Melilla. Nathalie had a sister, Louisette, and a brother. During the 1960s, Nathalie Delon was a model. She was photographed by top French and foreign photographers for famous magazines such as Vogue.

In 1967, Nathalie became a film actress, starring opposite her husband in the film Le Samouraï by Jean-Pierre Melville, which became a hit. Writing of the Delons' performances in Le Figaro, Bertrand Guyard notes husband and wife are both nearly silent but "their gazes, fraught with meaning, are enough to thrill the camera" with the director drawing from their portrayals "a mythical couple in the seventh art."

Afterwards, Nathalie Delon continued her acting career until the 1980s. In 1968 she appeared in The Private Lesson, which made her a star in Japan, ranking her in the top 10 of foreign actresses. In 1971, she appeared in When Eight Bells Toll with Anthony Hopkins and in 1972 she appeared in The Monk with Franco Nero. In 1973, she acted in Le Sex Shop, and her role was one of the film's "moments of real pleasure, as one of its "really marvelous girls", commented Roger Greenspun in The New York Times.

In addition to acting in 30 films during her career, she directed two: one was the story—also written by Delon—of a mother whose son dies in surgery, Ils appellent ça un accident (transl. They Call It an Accident) in 1982, and the other was Sweet Lies in 1988.