It was sad to see that great French actor Alain Delon had died the other day. He was a man of incomparable physical beauty but he also succeeded in making a much greater number of significant films than most of his contemporaries. He is the first of the many screen Ripleys in Plein Soleil. But he was also a favourite of that extraordinary man of stage and screen Luchino Visconti, the count who was also a Marxist and someone who had a depth of ambivalence about the culture he cherished. At the time of his famed production of Verdi’s Don Carlos he cast Delon and Romy Schneider in that black and dazzling tale of incest and murder ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore on the French stage. Delon also has a crucial role in Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers – one of the better films in the history of the world – and he is also perfectly cast in Visconti’s film of Lampedusa’s The Leopard as the impossibly good-looking nephew Tancredi. Il Gattopardo is Visconti’s extraordinary tribute to a passing world and that immense ball scene in which all the intimations of death slowly confront Burt Lancaster as the Prince, Fabrizio, he needs to have Claudia Cardinale and the dashing Delon evoking the beauty of transience and the making of history.

But Delon also has a marvellous sangfroid as those knights-errants of another world in those transfigured crime films Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge, directed by the great Jean-Pierre Melville. These films have an austere beauty as Delon enacts his destiny with an extraordinary power of understatement.

Somehow the fact that he looked like a god gives a staggering power of restraint to Delon’s characterisation. He’s also a figure shrouded in ambiguity in the Joseph Losey film Mr Klein where Delon plays a dodgy art dealer who shares a name with a Jew who fights for the resistance. It’s a subtle uncanny portrait about the enigmas of personality and it’s good to see Delon acting with that very great actress Jeanne Moreau.

There was the period when Visconti wanted to film Proust and it’s not hard to imagine Delon as Morel – in a world that could encompass Dirk Bogarde as Marcel – but when Volker Schlöndorff came to film Swann in Love with Jeremy Irons in the title role Alain Delon was there to steal the show as the Baron de Charlus, looking – very deliberately – like Robert de Montesquiou. It’s a sumptuous performance.

Delon was accused of associations with crime figures, with dark and dodgy characters, but it’s hard not to think that with a face like that and a power of reticence in all his acting envy underwrote the accusations.

He went through a stage of seeing himself as a European James Dean but he was in fact the zenith of something more than a pretty-boy actor. Visconti wanted him to play Meursault in L’Etranger but Delon was too expensive and he ended up with that splendid old stager Marcello Mastroianni who was not suited to the role. It’s hard not to imagine that Delon would have been the ideal actor to play the role. Well, now he is dead at 88 and some dream of male beauty and riveting quietness has gone out of the world.

It was good to see Boy Swallows Universe do so well in the Logies the other day. The staggeringly talented 15-year-old Felix Cameron won the best actor Logie in a drama with Bryan Brown taking the best supporting actor award for a performance of matchless wiry authority and Sophie Wilde won for best supporting actress. It was hardly surprising that Boy Swallows Universe won the award for best miniseries.

The fact that some staggering fraction of the world audience took to the show with such massive enthusiasm is one of those moments in the history of Australian culture like the resurgence – call it the renaissance if you want to – of Australian cinema in the 1970s. The fact that we could make one of the top-ranking Netflix shows and that this represented such an endorsement of the quality of our work here must make a significant difference to the perception of the entire industry.

It will be fascinating to see Jonathan Mills’ opera Eucalyptus based on Murray Bail’s novel. Jonathan Mills was knighted for his work on the Edinburgh Festival and there are people who will tell you that his Melbourne Festival of 2000 was the finest one we have ever seen. Wasn’t that the one where he had every cantata Bach wrote performed in the city and we also had the following year Steppenwolf, the great Chicago theatre company performing here with Willem Dafoe, no less, doing Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape. Jonathan Mills is one of those people who seems to just go out and get the best that’s on offer.

And, of course, it will be fascinating to see what he makes as music and drama of that literary masterwork Eucalyptus by Murray Bail, a novelist who has always had the capacity to use every apparent awkwardness of style as something that can be subjugated by the power of the overall design. And Eucalyptus is a work that uses the casket myth and which is a bit of a test case for the belief that mythic structure – and arguably myth as the fundamental unit of structure (Aristotle’s mythos) – was the defining quality of art. Back in 2005 there was an attempt to make a ‘straight’ dramatic film of Eucalyptus with Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe and Geoffrey Rush which came unstuck. Was that when Jocelyn Moorhouse was directing and Russell Crowe told her she was a Datsun and he was a Maserati? Such a mishap – which might have maddened another writer – did not seem to unduly worry Murray Bail at all.

Mitchell Butel has been made the new head of the Sydney Theatre Company and it will be interesting to see how he goes in the position Kip Williams has taken the attention of the world with and which is responsible for the fact that he’s doing the one-woman show of Dorian Gray with Sarah Snook in New York next year. The finest performance of Butel’s was in the Melbourne Theatre Company’s Disgraced in 2016.

He looked like a great Broadway star.