Claudia Cardinale, a luminous figure in Italian cinema throughout the 1960s, whose enchanting beauty was lauded by esteemed directors Luchino Visconti, Sergio Leone, and Federico Fellini, has died in Nemours, France, at the age of 87.
Her agent, Laurent Savry, confirmed her passing on Tuesday, though the cause was not disclosed. Cardinale had resided in Nemours, just south of Paris, in recent years.
Known for a long and prolific career in Europe, Ms. Cardinale also graced several Hollywood productions, notably Blake Edwards’s beloved comedy “The Pink Panther.” Her filmography boasts over 150 titles spanning six decades.
She embodied Marcello Mastroianni’s feminine ideal in Fellini’s “8½”; portrayed a spirited bordello owner funding her lover’s extraordinary ambition to build an opera house in the Amazon in Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo”; and took on the role of a resilient widow gunslinger in Sergio Leone’s epic “Once Upon a Time in the West.”
Italian film critic Massimo Benvegnù noted that while Ms. Cardinale was often mentioned alongside Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida as a 1960s and 70s Italian sex symbol, her screen presence offered a unique, more accessible appeal.
“The stars at the time, Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot and Jayne Mansfield — the ones known as the ‘maggiorate’ — were very curvaceous women,” he elaborated. “She was less curvaceous and more girl next door. She was more real.”
Surprisingly, acting wasn’t her initial ambition as a teenager, and early in her career, she faced challenges with the Italian language, having grown up speaking French.
Claude Joséphine Rose Cardinale was born on April 15, 1938, in the French protectorate of Tunisia to Francesco Cardinale and Yolanda Greco, immigrants from Sicily.
She was the eldest of four children, raised in a close-knit Sicilian community in Tunis. Her father worked as a technical engineer for the Tunisian railway, while her mother managed their home.
At 18, Claude participated in a beauty pageant, partly orchestrated by her mother at the Italian embassy in Tunisia. Crowned the “most beautiful Italian girl in Tunisia,” her prize included a trip to the Venice Film Festival. There, she garnered significant attention from the Italian media, which she later attributed to her bikini. Despite having already appeared in a couple of films, she initially told reporters she had no aspirations to become an actress.
“After that, she was on the cover of all the Italian magazines, under headlines like, ‘Here’s the girl who doesn’t want to make movies,’” Mr. Benvegnù recounted.
Claude returned to Tunisia, declining acting offers, but a traumatic teenage experience saw her sexually assaulted by an acquaintance, leading to an abusive relationship and pregnancy. In 1957, she gave birth to her son, Patrick, in London. Her parents shielded him by raising him as her younger brother, a secret kept until he was eight years old.
That same year, Italian producer Franco Cristaldi signed her to his studio, Vides Cinematografica (now Cristaldifilm), marking the beginning of her professional career as Claudia Cardinale.
Her breakthrough came in 1958 with the comedic crime story “I Soliti Ignoti” (“Big Deal on Madonna Street”), directed by Mario Monicelli. Soon after, she starred in a rapid succession of major films, including Fellini’s Oscar-winning “8½” and Visconti’s “The Leopard,” both in 1963.
“Then she just became known as ‘Italy’s girlfriend,’ the girl of your dreams,” Mr. Benvegnù said.
Ms. Cardinale also earned Italy’s prestigious Nastro d’Argento award for best actress for her role as Mara in Luigi Comencini’s “La Ragazza di Bube” (“Bebo’s Girl”). In the film, set at the end of World War II, she portrays a Tuscan peasant girl who falls in love with a partisan forced into hiding after being implicated in a double homicide.
She married Mr. Cristaldi in Las Vegas in 1966, but her daughter, Claudia Squitieri, noted that Ms. Cardinale never considered the marriage “official,” despite Cristaldi giving her son his last name.
In Fellini’s “8½,” set in a luxurious spa, Ms. Cardinale played an actress and muse (also named Claudia) to the protagonist, Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni). Guido sees her as the embodiment of his ideal woman, envisioning her as the ingenue of a science fiction film he plans to create.
“You are one of the girls who passes out the healing water,” he tells her upon her arrival at the spa. “She is beautiful, both young and ancient, a child and yet already a woman, authentic and radiant. There’s no doubt that she’s his salvation.”
Vito Zigarrio, a film critic and historian at the University of Rome and Venice Film Festival organizer, noted that this portrayal resonated deeply with audiences. “In many films she becomes an icon, something between reality and unreality,” he stated, “and this ambiguity between fantasy and reality makes the character very intense.”
In Visconti’s sweeping period drama “The Leopard,” she captivated audiences as a young Sicilian debutante who captures the hearts of both a soldier (Alain Delon) and his uncle (Burt Lancaster). In her 2005 autobiography, “Mes étoiles” (“My Stars”), co-written with Danièle Georget, she famously remarked: “You can learn beauty. Visconti taught me how to be beautiful. He taught me to cultivate mystery, without which, he said, there cannot be real beauty.”
In 1964, Ms. Cardinale ventured into comedy with her first American director, Blake Edwards, starring as a princess who loses a valuable jewel in “The Pink Panther.” The film featured an ensemble cast including Peter Sellers, David Niven, and Robert Wagner.
Another defining role came in Sergio Leone’s 1968 spaghetti western, “Once Upon a Time in the West.” Here, Ms. Cardinale portrayed a New Orleans prostitute who travels to the Southwest only to find her intended husband murdered by bandits.
As the sole female lead amidst a cast of formidable male antiheroes, including Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda, Ms. Cardinale “was able to hold her own with these extremely strong, major actors, and conveying a sense of interiority that is quite palpable,” observed Jay Weissberg, an American film critic based in Rome.
Antonio Monda, artistic director of the Rome Film Festival, highlighted her enduring independence, noting, “There was something free about her, a strong personality that would never be tamed. She was strongly independent.”
Around 1975, Ms. Cardinale divorced Mr. Cristaldi and began a relationship with director Pasquale Squitieri, an independent filmmaker known for his right-leaning views. Mr. Monda suggested this move was an act of emancipation: “She didn’t want to be thought of as only the product of a great producer.”
In later interviews, Ms. Cardinale revealed that her relationship with Mr. Cristaldi had been highly controlled. He dictated nearly every aspect of her life and retained most of her earnings from American film projects. “I was just an employee, like an office worker,” she told Variety.
The strained relationship and her subsequent affair with Squitieri led to their perceived blackballing from the Italian film industry. She relocated to France to rebuild her career, taking on numerous supporting roles.
Ms. Cardinale starred in almost a dozen of Mr. Squitieri’s films. They had a daughter in 1979 and remained together for 40 years until his death in 2017.
“It was an unconventional relationship,” Ms. Squitieri remarked about her parents, who lived together until 1989 and maintained a very close bond thereafter.
Ms. Cardinale was also part of the star-studded cast in the 1977 television mini-series “Jesus of Nazareth,” where she played an adulteress facing the threat of stoning.
Early in her career, Ms. Cardinale drew inspiration from French actress Brigitte Bardot, her co-star in the 1971 French western comedy “Les Pétroleuses” (“The Legend of Frenchie King”), directed by Christian-Jaque. The film, a parody of Hollywood westerns, featured all-female shootouts and a memorable fistfight between the two leading ladies.
“Bardot was her idol,” Ms. Squitieri shared. “Everyone was expecting a big rivalry between them but they actually became very good friends.”
In Mr. Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo” (1982), Ms. Cardinale, in a supporting role opposite Klaus Kinski as the title character, was crucial to the narrative. She portrayed a brothel madame whose unwavering belief in her lover’s outlandish dream of building an opera house in the Amazon fueled his bizarre plan to drag a steamship over a mountain.
Vincent Canby of The Times praised her performance, noting, “Miss Cardinale is not onscreen as long as one might wish, but she not only lights up her role, she also lights up Mr. Kinski,” transforming him “into a genuinely charming screen presence.”
The film earned the top award at the Cannes Film Festival and brought Ms. Cardinale a new wave of admirers, ensuring her continued presence on the radar of film producers and casting directors for years.
In her later life, Ms. Cardinale resided with her son and daughter in Nemours, establishing a foundation in her name to support arts focused on women and the environment. In 2000, UNESCO recognized her efforts, appointing her a good-will ambassador “in recognition of her commitment to improving the status of women and girls through education, as well as promoting and affirming their rights.”
Full details about her survivors were not immediately available.
In 2023, in collaboration with Cinecittà, Italy’s national film company, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a 23-film retrospective celebrating Ms. Cardinale’s distinguished career.
Though she no longer sought leading roles as she aged, Ms. Cardinale continued to work consistently across many countries, particularly in her adopted homeland of France.
“My mother was very adaptive,” Ms. Squitieri observed. “She is not a precious woman who has great needs, who is capricious because she is a star. She was always very humble in her requests. She always, always, always stopped to sign autographs. She detested the idea of bodyguards; she always wanted to be as close as she could to people. She felt very blessed by her luck.”