He entered the world far from glamour: a Parisian suburb, a pharmacist mother, and a father who dreamed of cinema. When that dream turned into a movie theater, his mother left her profession to sell tickets, then later to sell meat beside a new husband at a butcher’s shop. The little boy named Alain became an afterthought, handed to a nanny while his parents rebuilt their own lives.

Growing up between two families, he floated in a space where he felt both privileged and abandoned. Discipline came late, and mostly as rejection: expulsions from school, angry teachers, endless transfers. The butcher’s counter, the store, the Army, the waiter’s tray—each stage hardened him, stripped illusions, and taught him to survive. Long before cameras discovered his impossible beauty, life had already cast him in a harsher role: the boy who had to become a man with no one truly watching.