Claudia Cardinale, the luminous leading lady of 1960s Italian cinema, whose captivating beauty was celebrated by iconic directors like Luchino Visconti, Sergio Leone, and Federico Fellini, has passed away at 87 in Nemours, France. Hailed as Italy’s ‘dream girl,’ her agent confirmed her death, though a cause was not specified. Ms. Cardinale had been residing in Nemours, south of Paris, in recent years.
Cardinale’s extensive career spanned six decades, featuring in over 150 European films and several memorable Hollywood productions, including Blake Edwards’ comedy classic ‘The Pink Panther.’
She embodied Marcello Mastroianni’s ideal woman in Fellini’s ‘8½’; played a resilient bordello owner who finances her lover’s ambitious plan to construct an opera house in the Amazon jungle in Werner Herzog’s ‘Fitzcarraldo’; and portrayed a formidable widow gunslinger in Sergio Leone’s ‘Once Upon a Time in the West.’
Often compared to other Italian sex symbols of her era like Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, Cardinale possessed a more approachable, ‘girl-next-door’ charm, as noted by Italian film critic Massimo Benvegnù. He remarked that she was less overtly curvaceous, presenting a more ‘real’ image to audiences.
Interestingly, acting had not been her initial ambition as a teenager. For a portion of her career, she even struggled with speaking Italian, having grown up speaking French.
Born Claude Joséphine Rose Cardinale on April 15, 1938, in the French protectorate of Tunisia, she was the eldest of four siblings 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 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 media attention, primarily due to her bikini, she later recalled. Despite having already appeared in a few films, she told reporters at the time that she had no aspirations of becoming 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.
Upon returning to Tunisia, Claude rejected further acting offers to live with her parents. During her teenage years, she endured a sexual assault by an adult acquaintance, which coerced her into an abusive relationship and resulted in a pregnancy. In 1957, she gave birth to a son, Patrick, in London. To shield him from the circumstances, her parents raised him as her younger brother, only revealing the truth when he was eight years old.
That same year, Italian producer Franco Cristaldi signed her to his film studio, Vides Cinematografica (now Cristaldifilm), marking the beginning of her career as Claudia Cardinale.
Her breakthrough performance arrived in Mario Monicelli’s 1958 comedic crime story, ‘Big Deal on Madonna Street.’ This was followed by a rapid succession of major films, including Fellini’s Oscar-winning ‘8½’ and Visconti’s ‘The Leopard,’ both released in 1963.
“Then she just became known as ‘Italy’s girlfriend,’ the girl of your dreams,” Mr. Benvegnù stated.
Cardinale also starred in Luigi Comencini’s ‘La Ragazza di Bube’ (‘Bebo’s Girl’) in 1964, a commercial and critical success that earned her Italy’s Nastro d’Argento award for best actress, her first prestigious acting honor. In this role, she played Mara, a Tuscan peasant girl who, at the close of World War II, falls in love with a young partisan who must go into hiding after being accused of a double homicide.
She married Mr. Cristaldi in Las Vegas in 1966, but her daughter, Claudia Squitieri, later clarified that her mother did not consider the marriage ‘official,’ despite Cristaldi giving her son his last name.
In Fellini’s ‘8½,’ set in a lavish spa, Ms. Cardinale played an actress and muse figure (also named Claudia) to the protagonist, director Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni). He viewed her as the embodiment of his ideal woman, envisioning her 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 began to perceive Ms. Cardinale, noted Vito Zigarrio, a film critic and historian at the University of Rome. “In many films she becomes an icon, something between reality and unreality,” he said, “and this ambiguity between fantasy and reality makes the character very intense.”
In Visconti’s sweeping period drama ‘The Leopard,’ she portrayed a young Sicilian debutante who swiftly captured 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 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, Ms. Cardinale embraced a comedic role, marking her first collaboration with an American director, Blake Edwards. She starred as a princess who misplaces a valuable jewel in ‘The Pink Panther,’ alongside Peter Sellers, David Niven, and Robert Wagner.
Another pivotal role in Ms. Cardinale’s career came in Sergio Leone’s 1968 spaghetti western, ‘Once Upon a Time in the West.’ She played a New Orleans prostitute who travels to the Southwest to marry a man, only to discover 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, 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.
Her fierce independence in that film became a defining characteristic 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 asserted. “She was strongly independent.”
Ms. Cardinale divorced Mr. Cristaldi around 1975 to live with Pasquale Squitieri, an independent filmmaker known for his right-leaning views. “In a sense she wanted to emancipate herself,” Mr. Monda commented. “She didn’t want to be thought of as only the product of a great producer.”
In later interviews, Ms. Cardinale described her relationship with Mr. Cristaldi as one of total control. He dictated almost every aspect of her life, she said, and retained most of the salary she earned from American film productions. “I was just an employee, like an office worker,” she told Variety.
Their relationship became strained, and her subsequent affair with Mr. Squitieri reportedly led to their effective blackballing from the Italian film industry. To restart her career, she relocated to France, where she took on supporting roles.
Ms. 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 in separate cities for most of their time together, with him in Rome and her in Paris.
Ms. Cardinale also featured in the all-star cast of the 1977 television mini-series ‘Jesus of Nazareth,’ directed by Franco Zeffirelli, playing an adulteress facing the threat of stoning.
Early in her career, Ms. Cardinale had admired Brigitte Bardot, her co-star in the 1971 French western comedy ‘Les Pétroleuses’ (‘The Legend of Frenchie King’), directed by Christian-Jaque. This film, which satirized Hollywood tropes, featured all-female shootouts and a spirited fistfight between the two leading ladies.
“Bardot was her idol,” Ms. Squitieri recalled. “Everyone was expecting a big rivalry between them but they actually became very good friends.”
In Mr. Herzog’s ‘Fitzcarraldo’ (1982), Ms. Cardinale, despite a supporting role opposite Klaus Kinski as the title character, was crucial to the narrative. She played a brothel madame whose unwavering belief in her lover’s bizarre scheme to build an opera house in the Amazon fueled his audacious attempt to drag a steamship over a mountain.
“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 and won Ms. Cardinale a new legion of admirers, ensuring her continued presence on film producers’ and casting directors’ radars for years to come.
In her later years, Ms. Cardinale lived with her son and daughter in Nemours, where she established a foundation in her name dedicated to supporting arts that champion women and the environment. In 2000, UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization, honored her as 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.”
Ms. Cardinale is survived by her daughter and her son. Further details on other survivors were 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 Ms. Cardinale’s illustrious career.
As she matured, Ms. Cardinale transitioned from leading roles but maintained a consistent acting presence, particularly in France, her adopted home.
“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.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.