Claudia Cardinale, whose performances graced such Italian cinematic masterpieces as Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2, Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, has died. She was 87.
Cardinale died Tuesday in Nemours, near Paris, her agent, Laurent Savry, told the AFP.
Cardinale erupted onto the international scene in the early ’60s and became, along with Sophia Loren and Anna Magnani, one of the most prominent Italian stars of her epoch.
With more than 130 feature credits and a handful of theatrical roles in her name, she worked steadily from her debut in her early 20s until her death. She won three David di Donatello Awards — Italy’s equivalent of the Oscar — for best actress and received an honorary Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival in 1993.
“I was a movie star from a very young age. But I don’t deserve any credit for that — it was a question of fate,” Cardinale wrote in her 2005 autobiography, Mes étoiles (My Stars). “There was always a lucky star watching over me.”
Although she always has been associated with Italian cinema, Cardinale was actually born in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, on April 15, 1938. She grew up speaking French, Arabic and the native Sicilian dialect of her emigrant parents, only learning Italian as an adult.
While studying at the Paul Cambon School in Tunis, Cardinale and a few classmates were cast in Frenchman Rene Vautier’s short film, Anneaux d’or, which eventually screened at the 1958 Berlin Film Festival, and she made her feature debut with a small role opposite a young Omar Sharif in Jacques Baratier’s Goha, which made it to Cannes that year.
But it was while attending the Venice festival in 1957 that Cardinale, who had been sent there after being elected the “Most Beautiful Italian Girl in Tunisia,” made her first big splash (wearing a bikini on the Lido helped). She received several offers from the Italian film industry and briefly attended the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, but, unhappy with the experience and desirous to become a schoolteacher, soon returned to Tunisia.
Her plans were derailed when, at 19, she was raped, became pregnant and decided to keep the child, giving birth to a boy she named Patrick. To ensure the child’s future and avoid the scandals involved with having a baby out of wedlock, she signed with Italian producer Franco Cristaldi, who told her to pretend Patrick was her little brother.
Cardinale remained under contract with Cristaldi for the next 18 years, marrying the producer in 1966. Under his guidance, she did much of her best work, beginning with a role opposite Vittorio Gassman and Renato Salvatori in Mario Monicelli’s classic heist comedy, Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958).
In 1960, she was cast as Marcello Mastroianni’s lover in Mauro Bolognini’s Il bell’Antonio. The drama took home the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival and began a long collaboration between the actress and director, who worked together four more times. That year, Cardinale also co-starred in Luchino Visconti’s Milan-set epic Rocco and His Brothers, playing opposite Salvatori, Alain Delon and Annie Girardot.
The next year, she headlined Valerio Zurlini’s neorealist romance Girl With a Suitcase, playing a poor woman from the provinces in love with an earnest boy from the upper classes. The film, which premiered in competition in Cannes, earned Cardinale international renown as well as her first di Donatello award.
The year 1963 proved to be a watershed one for Cardinale, with the actress starring in three bona fide classics: The Leopard, 8 1/2 and Blake Edwards‘ The Pink Panther, which would be her breakthrough role in Hollywood.
In The Leopard, she played Angelica Sedara, a beautiful Sicilian who falls in love with Delon’s progressive aristocrat, Tancrede Falconeri, as the country is engulfed in political turmoil during the 1860s. The film won the Palme d’or in Cannes and is widely considered to be Visconti’s masterpiece. (It returned to the Croisette in 2010 for the premiere of its 4K restoration, with the screening attended by Cardinale and Delon.)
While shooting The Leopard, Cardinale also starred in Fellini’s autobiographical epic 8 1/2, playing Claudia, the muse of Mastrioanni’s existentially challenged director, Guido. After premiering out-of-competition in Cannes, it won Academy Awards for foreign-language film and black-and-white costume design and in 2019 was ranked No. 10 on Sight & Sound‘s list of the 50 greatest films of all time.
In a 2017 interview with Le Monde, Cardinale recalled what it was like shooting back-to-back movies with Visconti and Fellini, often shuttling between the two sets:
“Visconti was precise and meticulous, spoke to me in French and wanted me to have long brown hair,” she said. “Fellini was chaotic and didn’t have a script; he spoke Italian to me, cut my hair short and dyed it blond. Those were the two most important films of my life.”
In The Pink Panther, Cardinale starred as the wealthy Princess Dala, whose priceless diamond becomes the target of an aristocratic jewel thief played by David Niven. Although her husky voice was dubbed for the role, Cardinale was praised for her work on the film, with Niven apparently telling her, “After spaghetti, you’re Italy’s greatest invention.”
Cardinale temporarily relocated to Hollywood and made several movies there, including Henry Hathaway’s Circus World (1964), in which she played the daughter of John Wayne and Rita Hayworth; Richard Brooks’ Western The Professionals (1966), also starring Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin and Robert Ryan; Alexander Mackendrick’s surfer comedy Don’t Make Waves (1967), starring Tony Curtis; and Joseph Sargent‘s postwar thriller The Hell With Heroes (1968), with Rod Taylor.
Cardinale’s most memorable English-language role, however, came in a film directed by a fellow Italian: Playing a former prostitute and frontier widow who fights to protect her land against a ruthless railroad company in the epic spaghetti Western Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Cardinale gave a fiery performance for Leone that included a sadistic love scene with Henry Fonda.
“His wife stood behind the camera like a vulture, which completely paralyzed me,” Cardinale told Le Monde about shooting that sequence.
Indeed, Cardinale was rumored to be romantically linked with a number of leading men throughout her early career, including Delon, Mastroianni, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Steve McQueen. Yet she rarely spoke about her love life in public, only claiming in a late interview that she was “stupid” for having rejected the advances of Marlon Brando. “I never wanted to mix my private and public lives,” she said. “No flirting. No flings.”
Claudia Cardinale circa 1963.
Photofest
After divorcing Cristaldi in 1975, Cardinale began living with Neapolitan director Pasquale Squitieri, with whom she remained until his death in 2017. The two had a daughter, also named Claudia, and collaborated on features including I guappi (1974), Corleone (1977), Claretta (1984) and Atto di dolore (1990).
Cardinale worked steadily from the 1970s onward, nabbing another di Donatello prize for Luigi Zampa’s comedy A Girl in Australia (1971) and Italian Golden Globes for her leading roles in Claretta and Atto di dolore.
Highlights of the second half of her career included Marco Ferreri’s satirical Vatican-set drama, L’udienza (1972); Visconti’s English-language drama Conversation Piece (1974), in which she reteamed with the director and Lancaster; Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982), in which she played a mistress brought into the jungle by her lover (Klaus Kinski in the title role); and Marco Bellocchio’s Henry IV (1984) as she teamed again with Mastroianni.
Alongside her prolific work onscreen, Cardinale starred in stage productions of plays by Luigi Pirandello (How You Love Me), Tennessee Williams (Sweet Bird of Youth, The Glass Menagerie) and Neil Simon (The Odd Couple), with Squitieri often directing.
She also had a brief career as a disco singer in the 1970s, releasing such tracks as “Love Affair” and “Sun … I Love You,” which were minor hits in Europe and Japan.
Cardinale appeared on the inside foldout of early releases of Bob Dylan’s legendary 1966 Blonde on Blonde album (he was an admirer) and caused a stir when she wore a miniskirt to a meeting with the pope in 1967.
In 2008, Cardinale was awarded a Legion of Honor in her adopted home of France, where she resided in the final decades of her life. In 2017, her dancing image — from a photo taken on a Rome rooftop in 1959 — graced the official poster of the 70th Cannes Film Festival.
Reflecting on her impressive career on the occasion of the poster’s release, Cardinale offered advice for the young actresses who followed in her wake: “Never take on a role that will hurt you or make you sell out,” she warned. “And refuse to accept the awful caprices of certain directors or any form of professional blackmail. Yes, you need to fight!”
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