Delon’s maternal grandfather, Alfred Louis Arnold (1876–1959), was born in Paris and was a rider of the French army, gendarme. His parents were Just Arnold, born in 1847 in Bürglen, Uri, a shoemaker by trade, and Marie-Adéle Lienemann, born in 1849, a cook. He married Maria Minard (1881–1913), a model for Jeanne Lanvin. The couple had two children: a daughter, Édith Marie Suzanne Arnold, and a son, Henri Arnold.
Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon was born at 99 Houdan Street on 8 November 1935 in Sceaux, a wealthy suburb of Paris in the department of Seine (now Hauts-de-Seine). Son of François Fabien Delon (Craponne-sur-Arzon, 12 March 1904 – 1977), a projectionist and later the director of the cinema Le Régina in Bourg-la-Reine, and Édith Marie Suzanne Arnold (1911–1995), an assistant employed in a pharmacy and a theater usher at the cinema, he was born into a petit-bourgeois family.