French movie star Alain Delon, who died Sunday aged 88, said that in Japan he was like a deity. It wasn't an exaggeration, local fans told AFP on Monday.

"In Japan I am a kind of a god," Delon told Figaro Magazine in 1986 on one of his many visits to Japan, when women fainted and crowds chased his limousine.

"People get real pleasure from touching me, caressing my hand, kissing my fingers," he told the magazine, reporting on fans showering him with gifts from red roses to statuettes.

Delon's breakthrough role in Japan was "Purple Noon" (1960) as the handsome, homicidal anti-hero for the original screen version of Patricia Highsmith's thriller "The Talented Mr Ripley".

Delon played an "ambitious roughneck who loved money, women, and was ready for anything," said Sahoko Hata, a film critic who worked in the Japanese movie industry at the time.

"This thirst symbolised that of Japanese youth at the time," Hata told AFP.

Delon made the first of many visits to Japan in 1963 to promote his films, but also increasingly to appear in television variety shows and at society events.

His TV appearances frequently broke audience records and up until the mid-1970s he regularly topped rankings of the Japan's most popular celebrities.

"My friends in their 70s and 80s are still all madly in love with him. Even at 88, he looked great," Delon fan Seta, 74, told AFP on Monday.

"I used to think to myself: 'How is it possible for such an attractive person to exist in this world?'," the pensioner said in Tokyo.

"He was handsome, elegant and slightly mysterious," she said.

For Kaoru Fujita, a woman in her late 50s shopping in Tokyo with her daughter, Delon's name was "synonymous with 'the handsome man'."

"If I have to think of someone to compare him with, I would say George Clooney or Brad Pitt," she told AFP.

"But I don't think there is anyone who is as so classically handsome as he was. As an actor he was one of a kind."

Delon gradually transformed himself into a sort of ambassador of French chic, becoming the face of Japanese fashion brand D'Urban and appearing in adverts for Mazda cars.

The "Alain Delon" brand was launched in 1978, mainly aimed at Japan and other Asian countries, selling accessories from watches and socks to cigarettes.

In the 1980s and 1990s, a Japanese tour operator even offered organised trips to Europe that featured a banquet in Paris in the presence of Delon himself.

Extra paid options included having the honour of presenting Delon with a bouquet or having a souvenir photo taken with him.

Delon had a "dark, sad, mysterious, ambitious side, but also a bit of a loser", Yoshi Yatabe, a former programmer of the Tokyo International Film Festival, told AFP in 2022.

"This dark side really appealed to Japanese viewers who tend to like losers. In kabuki theatre, for example, the audience sympathises with the weakest," he said.

"France and Europe were a very far away place for me, so I would always wonder where he came from," remembered pensioner Mikiko Tsuburaya, 71.

"I was still a child, not a grown up yet (when he was popular). I would look at him as someone living in another world," the pensioner said. (AFP)