Claudia Cardinale, the dazzling leading lady of Italian cinema whose captivating charm and striking beauty earned her the affectionate title of ‘Italy’s dream girl,’ has passed away at 87 in Nemours, France. Her talent was famously celebrated by visionary directors like Luchino Visconti, Sergio Leone, and Federico Fellini.
Her agent, Laurent Savry, confirmed her passing on Tuesday, though the cause of death was not immediately released. In recent years, Cardinale had made her home in Nemours, a charming town located south of Paris.
Throughout her remarkable six-decade career primarily in Europe, Cardinale graced the screen in over 150 films. Her extensive filmography also included several notable Hollywood productions, such as Blake Edwards’s beloved comedy gem, ‘The Pink Panther.’
Her versatility shone through in diverse roles: she embodied Marcello Mastroianni’s ideal woman in Fellini’s surreal masterpiece ‘8½,’ portrayed a determined bordello owner funding an ambitious opera house project in Werner Herzog’s ‘Fitzcarraldo,’ and captivated audiences as a strong-willed widow in Sergio Leone’s epic Western, ‘Once Upon a Time in the West.’
Cardinale was often grouped with luminaries like Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida as leading Italian sex symbols of the 1960s and ’70s. However, she cultivated a distinctly more approachable screen persona, as noted by Italian film critic Massimo Benvegnù.
“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 added. “She was less curvaceous and more girl next door. She was more real.”
Interestingly, acting wasn’t her initial ambition as a teenager. For a period, she even struggled with speaking Italian, having been raised primarily in French.
Claude Joséphine Rose Cardinale was born on April 15, 1938, in the French protectorate of Tunisia. Her parents, Francesco Cardinale and Yolanda Greco, were immigrants from Sicily.
She was the eldest of four siblings, growing up in a close-knit Sicilian community in Tunis, the capital. Her father worked as a technical engineer for the Tunisian railway, while her mother managed their home.
At 18, Claude entered a beauty pageant, partially orchestrated by her mother, at the Italian embassy in Tunisia. Crowned the “most beautiful Italian girl in Tunisia,” her prize was a trip to the Venice Film Festival, where she garnered significant attention from the Italian media, partly due to her bikini, as she later recalled. Despite having already appeared in a couple of films, she expressed no ambition to become an actress at that time.
“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.
Upon returning to Tunisia, Claude rejected acting offers to live with her parents. During her teenage years, she endured a sexual assault by an acquaintance, leading to a coercive relationship and a pregnancy. In 1957, she gave birth to her son, Patrick, in London. To protect her, her parents raised Patrick as her younger brother, a secret they maintained until he was eight years old.
That same year, Italian producer Franco Cristaldi signed her to his studio, Vides Cinematografica (now Cristaldifilm), marking the official launch of her career as Claudia Cardinale.
Her breakthrough arrived with the 1958 comedic crime story “I Soliti Ignoti” (“Big Deal on Madonna Street”), directed by Mario Monicelli. Following this success, 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.
Cardinale also shone in Luigi Comencini’s “La Ragazza di Bube” (“Bebo’s Girl”), a film that brought her commercial success and critical acclaim, earning her Italy’s prestigious Nastro d’Argento award for best actress. In the film, she played Mara, a Tuscan peasant girl who, in the aftermath of World War II, falls for a young partisan forced into hiding after being implicated in a double homicide.
A few years later, in 1966, she married Mr. Cristaldi in Las Vegas. However, her daughter, Claudia Squitieri, noted that Cardinale never considered the marriage “official,” despite Cristaldi giving her son his last name.
In Fellini’s “8½,” set in a luxurious spa, Cardinale portrayed an actress and muse figure (also named Claudia) to the protagonist, Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni). To Guido, she personified his ideal woman, envisioned as the ingenue of a science fiction film he intended 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.”
This characterization perfectly captured how audiences increasingly viewed Cardinale, according to Vito Zigarrio, a film critic and historian at the University of Rome and an organizer of the Venice Film Festival. “In many films she becomes an icon, something between reality and unreality,” he observed, “and this ambiguity between fantasy and reality makes the character very intense.”
In Visconti’s sprawling period drama ‘The Leopard,’ she portrayed a young Sicilian debutante who quickly captivates both a soldier (Alain Delon) and his uncle (Burt Lancaster). In her 2005 autobiography, “Mes étoiles” (“My Stars”), co-written with Danièle Georget, she reflected: “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, Cardinale ventured into American cinema with a comedic role under director Blake Edwards in ‘The Pink Panther.’ She starred as a princess who loses a precious jewel, alongside 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.” Cardinale played a New Orleans prostitute who travels to the Southwest to marry a man, only to find he has been murdered by bandits upon her arrival.
As the sole female character amidst a cast of male antiheroes, including Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda, 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.
Her rugged independence in that film became a hallmark of her career, according to Antonio Monda, artistic director of the Rome Film Festival. “There was something free about her, a strong personality that would never be tamed,” he remarked. “She was strongly independent.”
Around 1975, Cardinale divorced Mr. Cristaldi to begin a life with director Pasquale Squitieri, an independent filmmaker known for his right-leaning and provocative style. “In a sense she wanted to emancipate herself,” Mr. Monda explained. “She didn’t want to be thought of as only the product of a great producer.”
In subsequent interviews, Cardinale described her relationship with Mr. Cristaldi as being under his complete control. She stated that he dictated nearly every aspect of her life and retained most of her earnings when she was lent to American filmmakers. “I was just an employee, like an office worker,” she told Variety.
The relationship grew strained, and her subsequent affair with director Pasquale Squitieri reportedly led to what Cardinale referred to as their effective blackballing from the Italian film industry. She eventually moved to France to rebuild her career, taking on supporting roles.
Cardinale appeared 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 said of her parents, who lived together until 1989 and remained extremely close afterward.
Cardinale also featured in the all-star 1977 television mini-series “Jesus of Nazareth,” portraying an adulteress facing the threat of stoning.
Early in her career, Cardinale had drawn 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 tropes, featured all-female shootouts and a memorable, rough-and-tumble fistfight between the two leading ladies.
“Bardot was her idol,” Ms. Squitieri confirmed. “Everyone was expecting a big rivalry between them but they actually became very good friends.”
In Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo” (1982), Cardinale, despite a supporting role opposite Klaus Kinski as the title character, was pivotal to the narrative. She played a brothel madame whose unwavering faith in her lover’s outlandish dream to build an opera house in the Amazon fueled his bizarre attempt to drag a steamship over a mountain as part of the plan.
“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,” Vincent Canby wrote in The Times, noting that she “helps to transform Mr. Kinski into a genuinely charming screen presence.”
The film garnered the top award at the Cannes Film Festival, winning Cardinale a new legion of admirers and solidifying her presence on the radar of film producers and casting directors for years to come.
In her later years, Cardinale resided with her son and daughter in Nemours, where she established a foundation in her name. This foundation champions the arts, with a particular focus on empowering women and environmental causes. In 2000, UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization, honored her as a goodwill ambassador “in recognition of her commitment to improving the status of women and girls through education, as well as promoting and affirming their rights.”
Complete information on her survivors was not immediately available.
In 2023, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in collaboration with Cinecittà (Italy’s national film company), hosted a 23-film retrospective celebrating Cardinale’s illustrious career.
As she matured, Cardinale gracefully transitioned from leading roles to consistently working in supporting capacities across many countries, particularly in her adopted home of France.
“My mother was very adaptive,” Ms. Squitieri reflected. “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 body guards; she always wanted to be as close as she could to people. She felt very blessed by her luck.”