Claudia Cardinale, a leading lady of Italian cinema in the 1960s, whose voluptuous beauty was celebrated by the film directors Luchino Visconti, Sergio Leone and Federico Fellini as she drew acclaim as Italy’s “dream girl,” has died in Nemours, France. She was 87.
Her agent, Laurent Savry, confirmed the death to Agence France-Presse on Tuesday. The cause was not reported. Ms. Cardinale had lived in Nemours, south of Paris, in recent years.
Ms. Cardinale, who also starred in a number of Hollywood films, including Blake Edwards’s comedy classic “The Pink Panther,” appeared in more than 150 movies during her six-decade career in Europe.
She was Marcello Mastroianni’s feminine ideal in Fellini’s “8½”; a bordello owner who bankrolls an outlandish scheme by her lover to build an opera house in the Amazon jungle in Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo”; and a widow gunslinger in Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West.”
Ms. Cardinale was often grouped with Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida as the Italian sex symbols of the 1960s and ’70s, though she had a slightly more approachable screen persona, Massimo Benvegnù, an Italian film critic, said in an interview.
“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.”
But acting had not been her ambition as a teenager, and for part of her career she had trouble speaking Italian because she had 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 siblings raised in a tight-knit Sicilian community in Tunis, the capital. Her father was a technical engineer for the Tunisian railway, and her mother managed the home.
Claude was 18 when she entered a beauty pageant that had been orchestrated in part by her mother at the Italian embassy in Tunisia. She was crowned the “most beautiful Italian girl in Tunisia.” Her prize was a trip to the Venice Film Festival, where she was widely photographed by the Italian media. (It was because of her bikini, she later said.) Even though she had already appeared in a couple of films, she told reporters in interviews at the time that she didn’t aspire 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 said.
Claude returned to Tunisia to live with her parents, rejecting acting offers. When she was still a teenager, she was sexually assaulted by an adult acquaintance, who coerced her into an abusive relationship that led to her becoming pregnant, her daughter, Claudia Squitieri, said in an interview. In 1957, the young actress gave birth to her son, Patrick, in London. Given the circumstances, her parents raised him as her younger brother, a secret they kept from him until he was 8 years old.
That year, the Italian producer Franco Cristaldi signed her to his film studio, Vides Cinematografica (now Cristaldifilm), and Claude launched her career as Claudia Cardinale.
Her breakout role was in the 1958 comedic crime story “I Soliti Ignoti” (“Big Deal on Madonna Street”), directed by Mario Monicelli. She starred in several major films in quick succession, including, in 1963, Fellini’s Oscar-winning “8½” and Visconti’s “The Leopard.”
“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,” a commercial and critical success that earned her Italy’s Nastro d’Argento award for best actress, her first prestigious acting honor. She played the role of Mara, a peasant girl from Tuscany who, at the end of World War II, falls in love with a young partisan who must go into hiding after being accused of involvement in a double homicide.
She married Mr. Cristaldi in Las Vegas a few years later, in 1966, but did not consider the marriage “official,” Ms. Squitieri said, even though Mr. Cristaldi gave her son his last name.
In the Fellini film, set in a luxurious spa, Ms. Cardinale played an actress and muse figure (also named Claudia) to the protagonist, Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni). To him she embodies his ideal woman and envisions her as the ingénue of a science fiction film he plans to make.
“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.”
The characterization aptly described how audiences began viewing Ms. Cardinale, said 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 sprawling period drama “The Leopard,” she played a young Sicilian debutante who quickly wins the hearts of both a soldier (Alain Delon) and his uncle (Burt Lancaster). In her 2005 autobiography, “Mes étoiles” (“My Stars”), 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 took a comic turn with her first job working for an American director, Blake Edwards, as a princess who lost a precious jewel in “The Pink Panther,” which also starred Peter Sellers, David Niven and Robert Wagner.
Another career-defining role for Ms. Cardinale came in Sergio Leone’s 1968 spaghetti western, “Once Upon a Time in the West,” in which she played a New Orleans prostitute who moves to the Southwest to marry a man who, by the time she arrives, has been murdered by bandits.
As the sole female character in a cast of male antiheroes led by 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,” said Jay Weissberg, an American film critic based in Rome.
Her rugged independence in that film also became a signature of her career, said 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.”
Around 1975, Ms. Cardinale divorced Mr. Cristaldi to live with the director Pasquale Squitieri, an independent filmmaker who was known as a right-leaning provocateur. “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 being under his complete control. He dictated nearly every aspect of her life, she said, and kept most of the salary she earned 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 the director Pasquale Squitieri led to what Mrs. Cardinale called their effective blackballing from the Italian film industry. She said she left for France to restart her career, taking supporting roles.
Ms. Cardinale appeared in almost a dozen of Mr. Squitieri’s films. They had a daughter in 1979 and stayed 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.
Ms. Cardinale also appeared as part of an all-star cast in the 1977 television mini-series “Jesus of Nazareth,” playing an adulteress who is threatened with stoning.
Early in her career, Ms. Cardinale had modeled herself on the 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, 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 Mr. Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo” (1982), Ms. Cardinale, though in a supporting role (performing opposite Klaus Kinski as the title character), was essential to the story as the brothel madame whose faith in her lover’s scheme to build an opera house in the Amazon invigorates his bizarre attempt, as part of the plan, 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 took the top award at the Cannes Film Festival and won Ms. Cardinale a host of new admirers, putting her on film producers’ and casting directors’ radar once more 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 the arts that give attention to women and the environment. In 2000, she was named a good-will ambassador by UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization, “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, in conjunction with Cinecittà, Italy’s national film company, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted a 23-film retrospective of Ms. Cardinale’s career.
As she got older, Ms. Cardinale no longer commanded leading roles but continued to work consistently, and in many countries, particularly in France, her adopted country.
“My mother was very adaptive,” said Ms. Squitieri. “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.”
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