Claudia Cardinale, a quintessential leading lady of Italian cinema throughout the 1960s, whose dazzling beauty and magnetic screen presence were celebrated by legendary directors Luchino Visconti, Sergio Leone, and Federico Fellini, has died at 87 in Nemours, France. Revered as Italy’s “dream girl,” Cardinale’s passing marks the end of an era.
Her agent, Laurent Savry, confirmed her death to Agence France-Presse on Tuesday. While the cause was not disclosed, Ms. Cardinale had resided in Nemours, a town south of Paris, in recent years.
Over her illustrious six-decade career in Europe, Ms. Cardinale graced more than 150 films. She also captivated American audiences in several Hollywood productions, notably starring in Blake Edwards’s beloved comedy classic, ‘The Pink Panther.’
Her diverse roles included portraying Marcello Mastroianni’s feminine ideal in Fellini’s ‘8½,’ a spirited bordello owner financing her lover’s audacious plan to build an opera house in the Amazon jungle in Werner Herzog’s ‘Fitzcarraldo,’ and a resilient widow gunslinger in Sergio Leone’s epic ‘Once Upon a Time in the West.’
A candid black-and-white photo shows Ms. Cardinale, casually dressed and wearing a head scarf, with Federico Fellini in 1963 on the set of his ‘8½,’ one of several major films she made in quick succession. Another image captures Ms. Cardinale with Sergio Leone during the making of his 1968 spaghetti western, ‘Once Upon a Time in the West.’ Both photos are via Getty Images.
Italian film critic Massimo Benvegnù noted that while Ms. Cardinale was often placed alongside contemporaries like Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida as a symbol of Italian sensuality in the 1960s and ’70s, she possessed a distinctly more approachable screen persona.
“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 explained. “She was less curvaceous and more girl next door. She was more real.”
Surprisingly, becoming an actress was not her ambition as a teenager. Furthermore, she initially struggled with speaking Italian for much of her career, having grown up primarily speaking 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 Sicilian immigrants.
She was the eldest of four siblings, raised within 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. She was crowned the “most beautiful Italian girl in Tunisia,” and her prize was a trip to the Venice Film Festival. There, her presence, particularly in a bikini, led to widespread media attention. Despite having already appeared in a few films, she consistently told reporters at the time that she had no aspirations to become an actress.
A black-and-white photo from the 1950s shows Ms. Cardinale in Italy, standing at the foot of ancient stairs, smiling in a striped one-piece outfit. An Italian critic observed that “in many films, she becomes an icon, something between reality and unreality.” Photo via Getty Images.
“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 recalled.
Upon returning to Tunisia, Claude lived with her parents, rejecting numerous acting offers. However, during her teenage years, she endured a sexual assault by an acquaintance, which led to an abusive relationship and, ultimately, a pregnancy. Her daughter, Claudia Squitieri, revealed in an interview that Ms. Cardinale gave birth to her son, Patrick, in London in 1957. Due to the circumstances, her parents raised Patrick as her younger brother, only revealing the truth to him 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 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. This led to a string of major successes in quick succession, including Fellini’s Oscar-winning ‘8½’ and Visconti’s ‘The Leopard,’ both released in 1963.
A black-and-white photo shows Ms. Cardinale with Renato Salvatori in ‘Big Deal on Madonna Street’ (1958), her breakout film directed by Mario Monicelli. Another black-and-white photo features Ms. Cardinale with Alain Delon in ‘The Leopard’ (1963). She credited the film’s director, Luchino Visconti, with teaching her “how to be beautiful.” Both photos are via Getty Images.
“Then she just became known as ‘Italy’s girlfriend,’ the girl of your dreams,” Mr. Benvegnù said.
Ms. Cardinale’s success continued with Luigi Comencini’s ‘La Ragazza di Bube’ (or ‘Bebo’s Girl’) in 1964, a commercial and critical triumph that earned her Italy’s prestigious Nastro d’Argento award for best actress. In the film, she portrayed Mara, a Tuscan peasant girl who falls in love with a young partisan (George Chakiris) at the end of World War II, only for him to go into hiding after being implicated in a double homicide.
She married Mr. Cristaldi in Las Vegas in 1966. However, her daughter, Ms. Squitieri, stated that Ms. Cardinale never considered the marriage “official,” despite Mr. 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, director Guido Anselmi (played by Marcello Mastroianni). Guido envisions her as his ideal woman and the ingenue of a science fiction film he plans to create.
An elegant black-and-white photo depicts Ms. Cardinale in ‘8½,’ standing with her left hand on her hip and her right arm resting on a flowered surface. She embodied the actress and muse figure who the movie’s protagonist, Marcello Mastroianni, saw as his ideal woman. Photo via Getty Images.
“You are one of the girls who passes out the healing water,” Guido 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, historian at the University of Rome, and Venice Film Festival organizer, noted that this portrayal perfectly captured how audiences began to perceive Ms. Cardinale. “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 starred 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 wrote: “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 embarked on a comedic turn in her first collaboration with an American director, Blake Edwards. She played a princess who loses a valuable jewel in ‘The Pink Panther,’ sharing the screen with Peter Sellers, David Niven, and Robert Wagner.
A black-and-white photo shows Ms. Cardinale elegantly dressed, smiling as David Niven, with a thin mustache, shows her an item of jewelry. This was from Blake Edwards’s ‘The Pink Panther’ (1964), her first film for an American director, co-starring Peter Sellers and Robert Wagner. Photo via Getty Images.
Another defining role came in Sergio Leone’s 1968 spaghetti western, ‘Once Upon a Time in the West.’ Here, she played a New Orleans prostitute who travels to the Southwest to marry a man who is tragically murdered by bandits before her arrival.
As the sole female character 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,” remarked Jay Weissberg, an American film critic in Rome.
Antonio Monda, artistic director of the Rome Film Festival, noted that her fierce independence in that film became a hallmark of her career. “There was something free about her, a strong personality that would never be tamed,” he said. “She was strongly independent.”
A black-and-white photo from 1969 captures Ms. Cardinale wearing a fur coat and dark glasses, standing with her husband, Italian screenwriter and producer Franco Cristaldi, in front of a building. They divorced around 1975. Photo via Getty Images.
Around 1975, Ms. Cardinale divorced Mr. Cristaldi to live with Pasquale Squitieri, an independent filmmaker known for his right-leaning provocateur 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 later interviews, Ms. Cardinale recounted her relationship with Mr. Cristaldi as one of strict control. She stated that he dictated nearly every aspect of her life and retained most of her earnings from American film productions. “I was just an employee, like an office worker,” she told Variety.
The relationship eventually soured, and her subsequent affair with Mr. Squitieri reportedly led to their effective blackballing from the Italian film industry. She relocated to France to revitalize her career, accepting numerous supporting roles.
Ms. Cardinale collaborated with Mr. Squitieri on almost a dozen films. They welcomed a daughter in 1979 and remained together for four decades, until his death in 2017.
“It was an unconventional relationship,” Ms. Squitieri said of her parents, who lived together until 1989 and maintained a deeply close bond afterward.
A black-and-white photo shows Ms. Cardinale in 1978 with Italian director Pasquale Squitieri. They stand close together, smiling faintly, with his right arm hooked around her neck. They had a daughter in 1979 and were together for 40 years until his passing in 2017. Photo via Getty Images.
She also joined an all-star cast in 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 looked up to Brigitte Bardot, her co-star in the 1971 French western comedy ‘Les Pétroleuses’ (‘The Legend of Frenchie King’), directed by Christian-Jaque. This film parodied Hollywood tropes, featuring 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 Werner Herzog’s ‘Fitzcarraldo’ (1982), Ms. Cardinale, though in a supporting role opposite Klaus Kinski as the title character, was crucial to the narrative. She portrayed a brothel madame whose unwavering faith in her lover’s outlandish dream to build an opera house in the Amazon fueled his bizarre endeavor, which included dragging a steamship over a mountain.
A photo shows Klaus Kinski and Ms. Cardinale on location in Peru for the set of ‘Fitzcarraldo’ (1981). Both are dressed in white and wear hats, standing close with Kinski’s arm around her. Werner Herzog, the film’s director, is in the foreground, looking serious. Photo via Getty Images.
“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, observing 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 earned Ms. Cardinale a legion of new admirers, keeping her firmly on the radar of film producers and casting directors for years to come.
In her later years, Ms. Cardinale resided with her son and daughter in Nemours, where she established a foundation dedicated to supporting arts that highlight women and environmental issues. In 2000, UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization, appointed her a goodwill ambassador, acknowledging “her commitment to improving the status of women and girls through education, as well as promoting and affirming their rights.”
A photo shows Ms. Cardinale and her daughter, Claudia Squitieri, elegantly dressed and smiling broadly at the opening ceremony of the 2004 Marrakech Film Festival, where Ms. Cardinale was honored with a small glass award. Photo via Getty Images.
Full details regarding her 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 extensive career.
While she no longer commanded leading roles as she aged, Ms. Cardinale maintained a consistent acting presence, particularly in France, her adopted country.
“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 bodyguards; she always wanted to be as close as she could to people. She felt very blessed by her luck.”