Through Europe, Hollywood, South America, Canada, Australia, Russia… She laughed, sang, danced, loved, and shone before the cameras of the greatest: Abel Gance, Werner Herzog, Blake Edwards, Sergio Leone, Jerzy Skolimowski, Henri Verneuil, Manoel de Oliveira, and so many others — not least in Fellini’s 8½ and Visconti’s The Leopard, Palme d’or in 1963.
An adventurous, free-spirited, and fiery Italian, she captured our hearts in film after film — nearly 150 — always with the luminous grace of joy and boldness.
And now, as she embarks on this final journey, we say once more to Claudia Cardinale how infinitely we admired her along the way, and how profoundly she will be missed.
[Paris, France | AFP | Raphaëlle Picard] – She captivated Visconti and Fellini, bewitched Delon, Belmondo and Mastroianni: the embodiment of Italian beauty, Claudia Cardinale, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 87, graced more than 150 films with her radiant presence, including the masterpieces The Leopard and 8½.
Wild and a tomboy in her youth, this Italian from Tunisia who later became a French citizen had, almost by accident, turned into an international film star, awarded a Golden Lion in Venice in 1993 and a Golden Bear in Berlin in 2002.
“She is the only simple and wholesome girl in this world of neurotics and hypocrites,” Marcello Mastroianni once said of her.
She starred in the finest of Italy’s cinematic renaissance (Bolognini, Zurlini, Squitieri), shone in Hollywood (Edwards, Brooks, Leone), in France (Broca, Verneuil), and even in Germany with Werner Herzog in his ill-fated Fitzcarraldo.
“I had the good fortune to begin during the magical years of cinema. All the great directors were my mentors, and I never once called them — they were the ones who asked for me,” she recalled at the age of 74 on France Culture.
Born in La Goulette, near Tunis, on April 15, 1938, to a French mother and a Sicilian father, Claude Joséphine Rose Cardinale spoke French, Arabic and Sicilian, but began her career in Italian cinema. Directors disliked her husky voice and French accent, so she was dubbed — until Fellini kept her voice in 8½ (1963).
At 17, a beauty contest she won without even entering changed her life: “The Most Beautiful Italian Girl in Tunis” prize earned her a trip to the Venice Film Festival, where she made a sensation.
“I didn’t want to act in films. It was my sister’s dream. But they insisted so much (…) that my father finally gave in,” she confided years later on France Inter.
Under contract to producer Franco Cristaldi, she became his protégé. During the filming of Monicelli’s cult comedy Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), she discovered she was pregnant. Years later, she revealed she had been raped.
A “fairy-tale heroine”
Her producer forced her to hide the pregnancy. After secretly giving birth in London, he persuaded her to entrust the baby to her parents: Patrick would officially be her younger brother until she revealed the truth seven years later.
She was only 22 when Visconti cast her in Rocco and His Brothers (1960). He had her eyes darkened with makeup and taught her the craft. Cardinale would follow him everywhere: in The Leopard (1963), she lit up the screen alongside Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon. At the same time, she starred in another masterpiece, Fellini’s 8½.
“Visconti, precise and meticulous like a theatre director, spoke to me in French and wanted me as a brunette with long hair. Fellini, chaotic and without a script, spoke to me in Italian and preferred me blonde with short hair. These were the two most important films of my life,” she told Le Monde.
At 23, she made a dazzling debut at Cannes with Zurlini’s Girl with a Suitcase and Bolognini’s The Lovemakers: people called her a brunette Bardot. Ten years later, “BB” and “CC” would act together, rolling in the dust in Les Pétroleuses.
“I became the heroine of a fairy tale, the symbol of a country whose language I barely spoke,” she wrote in her autobiography My Stars.
Courted by Hollywood — though she refused to settle there — she won over American audiences in The Pink Panther, then in Henry Hathaway’s Circus World, playing Rita Hayworth’s daughter.
After Sandra by Visconti, in which she wore the wedding dress of the director’s mother, and The Professionals with Burt Lancaster, she became the heroine of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), the only woman among Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda.
The Neapolitan Pasquale Squitieri, her partner for nearly 30 years, her “only love” and the father of her daughter Claudia, directed her in ten films between 1974 and 2011.
In 2017, the Cannes Film Festival chose a youthful photograph of her for its official poster, paying tribute to “an adventurous actress, an independent woman, an engaged citizen.”
To young actresses, the star — who always refused to appear nude — gave this advice: never “accept everything for the sake of a role that may wound you, or leave you feeling as if you’ve sold yourself.”
