Claudia Cardinale, the enchanting leading lady who defined Italian cinema in the 1960s, passed away peacefully on Tuesday in Nemours, France, at the age of 87. Celebrated for her captivating beauty and dubbed ‘Italy’s dream girl,’ she left an indelible mark on film, working with legendary directors such as Luchino Visconti, Sergio Leone, and Federico Fellini.
Her passing was confirmed by her agent, Laurent Savry, though no specific cause of death was disclosed. In her later years, Ms. Cardinale resided in Nemours, a charming town located south of Paris.
With a career spanning over six decades, Cardinale graced the silver screen in more than 150 films across Europe. Her talent also shone brightly in Hollywood, notably in Blake Edwards’s beloved comedy, ‘The Pink Panther.’
Cardinale’s versatility captivated audiences in diverse roles: she was Marcello Mastroianni’s envisioned feminine ideal in Fellini’s ‘8½’; a spirited bordello owner backing an audacious Amazonian opera house project in Werner Herzog’s ‘Fitzcarraldo’; and a resilient widow gunslinger in Sergio Leone’s epic ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’.
A captivating black-and-white image shows Ms. Cardinale alongside Federico Fellini in 1963 on the set of his groundbreaking film ‘8½,’ a testament to her rapid rise in a series of major cinematic achievements.
Another iconic black-and-white photograph captures Ms. Cardinale with director Sergio Leone during the production of his 1968 spaghetti western masterpiece, ‘Once Upon a Time in the West.’
While often celebrated alongside contemporaries like Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida as an Italian sex symbol of the 1960s and ’70s, Ms. Cardinale possessed a uniquely approachable screen presence, according to Italian film critic Massimo Benvegnù.
Benvegnù elaborated, stating that while other prominent stars of the era, the ‘maggiorate’ like Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, and Jayne Mansfield, were known for their voluptuous figures, Cardinale offered something different. ‘She was less curvaceous and more girl next door. She was more real,’ he explained, highlighting her relatable appeal.
Interestingly, acting wasn’t Cardinale’s initial ambition during her teenage years. Adding to her unique background, she often struggled with spoken Italian throughout parts of her career, having been raised primarily 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 siblings, growing up in a close-knit Sicilian community in Tunis, the nation’s 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, partly orchestrated by her mother at the Italian Embassy in Tunisia, where she was 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, which she later attributed to her bikini. Despite having already appeared in a few films, she consistently told reporters at the time that she had no aspirations of becoming an actress.
A vintage black-and-white photo shows Ms. Cardinale in Italy during the 1950s, embodying the very essence of an emerging icon. As one Italian critic noted, ‘In many films, she becomes an icon, something between reality and unreality.’
‘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 said.
Claude returned to Tunisia, rejecting acting offers to live with her parents. During her teenage years, she endured a sexual assault by an acquaintance, which led to a coerced, abusive relationship and eventual pregnancy, as recounted by her daughter, Claudia Squitieri. In 1957, she gave birth to her son, Patrick, in London. Due to 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), and Claude officially began her career as Claudia Cardinale.
Her breakthrough performance came in the 1958 comedic crime story ‘Big Deal on Madonna Street,’ directed by Mario Monicelli. She went on to star in several major films in rapid succession, including Fellini’s Oscar-winning ‘8½’ and Visconti’s ‘The Leopard,’ both released in 1963.
A striking black-and-white still from ‘Big Deal on Madonna Street’ (1958) features Ms. Cardinale with Renato Salvatori, showcasing her breakout role under Mario Monicelli’s direction.
Another classic black-and-white scene captures Ms. Cardinale alongside Alain Delon in ‘The Leopard’ (1963). She famously credited the film’s director, Luchino Visconti, with teaching her ‘how to be beautiful.’
‘Then she just became known as ‘Italy’s girlfriend,’ the girl of your dreams,’ Mr. Benvegnù said.
Ms. Cardinale also starred in Luigi Comencini’s ‘La Ragazza di Bube,’ or ‘Bebo’s Girl’ (1964), a commercial and critical triumph that earned her Italy’s prestigious Nastro d’Argento award for best actress. In the film, set at the end of World War II, she portrayed Mara, a Tuscan peasant girl who falls for a young partisan, played by George Chakiris, forced into hiding after being accused of a double homicide.
She married Mr. Cristaldi in Las Vegas in 1966. However, her daughter, Ms. Squitieri, stated that Ms. Cardinale did not consider the marriage ‘official,’ even though Mr. Cristaldi gave 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 film’s protagonist, director Guido Anselmi, portrayed by Marcello Mastroianni. Anselmi saw her as the embodiment of his ideal woman, envisioning her as the ingenue for a science fiction film he planned to create.
An elegant image of Ms. Cardinale in ‘8½’ highlights her role as an actress and muse figure, embodying the movie’s protagonist’s ideal woman.
‘You are one of the girls who passes out the healing water,’ he tells her when she arrives at the spa to prepare for her role. ‘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 mirrored how audiences began to perceive Ms. Cardinale, noted 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 said, ‘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 quickly won the affections of both a soldier, Alain Delon, and his aristocratic uncle, Burt Lancaster. In her 2005 autobiography, ‘Mes Étoiles’ (‘My Stars’), co-written with Danièle Georget, she shared, ‘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 showcased her comedic talents for the first time with an American director, Blake Edwards. She starred as a princess who loses a precious jewel in ‘The Pink Panther,’ a film that also featured Peter Sellers, David Niven, and Robert Wagner.
A delightful still captures Ms. Cardinale with David Niven in Blake Edwards’s ‘The Pink Panther’ (1964), a star-studded comedy marking her first collaboration with an American director.
Another career-defining role for Ms. Cardinale arrived in Sergio Leone’s 1968 spaghetti western, ‘Once Upon a Time in the West,’ where she played a New Orleans prostitute who travels to the Southwest, only to find her intended husband 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 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 said. ‘She was strongly independent.’
A striking black-and-white photograph from 1969 shows Ms. Cardinale with her then-husband, Italian screenwriter and producer Franco Cristaldi, whom she divorced around 1975.
Ms. Cardinale divorced Mr. Cristaldi around 1975 to live with Pasquale Squitieri, an independent filmmaker known for his right-leaning provocations. ‘In a sense she wanted to emancipate herself,’ Mr. Monda said. ‘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 complete control. He dictated nearly every aspect of her life, she revealed, and kept most of the salary she earned when she was loaned out to American filmmakers. ‘I was just an employee, like an office worker,’ she told Variety.
The relationship grew strained, and her subsequent affair with Mr. Squitieri led to what Ms. Cardinale called their effective blackballing from the Italian film industry. In an effort to restart her career, she moved 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.
A black-and-white photo from 1978 shows Ms. Cardinale with Italian director Pasquale Squitieri, with whom she had a daughter and remained for four decades until his passing.
‘It was an unconventional relationship,’ Ms. Squitieri said of her parents, who lived in separate cities for most of the time they were together, he in Rome and she in Paris.
Ms. Cardinale also appeared as part of an all-star cast in the 1977 television mini-series ‘Jesus of Nazareth,’ directed by Franco Zeffirelli, playing an adulteress threatened with stoning.
Early in her career, Ms. Cardinale had modeled herself on Brigitte Bardot, her co-star in the 1971 French western comedy ‘Les Pétroleuses’ (‘The Legend of Frenchie King’), directed by Christian-Jaque. That film, which parodied Hollywood tropes, included all-female shootouts and a rough-and-tumble fistfight between the two leading ladies.
‘Bardot was her idol,’ Ms. Squitieri said. ‘Everyone was expecting a big rivalry between them but they actually became very good friends.’
In Werner Herzog’s ‘Fitzcarraldo’ (1982), Ms. Cardinale, though in a supporting role opposite Klaus Kinski as the title character, was essential to the story. She played the brothel madame whose unwavering faith in her lover’s outlandish scheme to build an opera house in the Amazon invigorated his bizarre attempt to drag a steamship over a mountain as part of the plan.
A candid shot captures Klaus Kinski and Ms. Cardinale on location in Peru during the filming of ‘Fitzcarraldo’ (1981), with director Werner Herzog in the foreground.
‘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 host of new admirers, placing her firmly back 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 that supports arts focusing on women and the environment. In 2000, UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization, named her 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.’
A heartwarming image shows Ms. Cardinale and her daughter, Claudia Squitieri, at the opening ceremony of the 2004 Marrakech Film Festival, where Ms. Cardinale was honored.
Ms. Cardinale’s survivors include her daughter and her son. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
In 2023, in conjunction with Cinecittà, Italy’s national film company, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted a 23-film retrospective celebrating Ms. Cardinale’s remarkable career.
As she grew older, Ms. Cardinale no longer commanded leading roles. However, she continued to work consistently, particularly in France, her adopted home.
‘My mother was very adaptive,’ Ms. Squitieri said. ‘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.’