The Italian film world of the 1950s helped several talented and photogenic actresses–Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren, Anna Magnani, and Monica Vitti, among others–rise to global acclaim. One such performer, however, took a circuitous route to stardom, thanks to growing up in the North African country of Tunisia. Claudia Cardinale, the earthy beauty who went from teen pageant winner to box office bombshell to art cinema favorite, passed away this week at the age of 87.
The daughter of Sicilian immigrants, Cardinale was born in the Mediterranean port city of Tunis in 1938. When she was 18 Claudia won a contest and was dubbed the “most beautiful Italian girl in Tunisia.” A visit to the Venice Film Festival followed, but the teen was more interested in modeling than filmmaking. Two obstacles held up her acting career: an unfamiliarity with the Italian language (she grew up speaking French and Sicilian), and giving birth to her first child after an abusive relationship with a man 10 years her senior.
Cardinale made her feature film debut alongside Omar Sharif in the 1958 French-Tunisian drama Doha, and later that year had a memorable appearnace in Mario Monicelli’s Italian caper comedy The Big Deal on Madonna Street. Her first English-language performance came in the 1959 British comedy Upstairs and Downstairs, and by the decade’s end young Claudia was seen as the latest in a string of Italian cinematic sex symbols. Her down-to-earth screen presence contrasted with her contemporaries, though, earning her the nickname “Italy’s Sweetheart.”
In 1960 she teamed with Marcello Mastroianni in Il bell’Antonio, the first of four pictures she would make for director Mauro Bolognini. She also played Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister, Pauline, in Abel Gance’s epic The Battle of Austerlitz, and was featured in Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers. Frederico Fellini cast Claudia as filmmaker Mastroianni’s “ideal woman” in his acclaimed 1963 semiautobiographical 8 1/2. That same year Cardinale and Visconti reunited for the 19th-century costume drama The Leopard, where she was the goddaughter of a Sicilian prince (Burt Lancaster). She also tried her hand at comedy as the exiled Indian (!) princess who owns the title diamond in Blake Edwards’ The Pink Panther.
Throughout the remainder of the ’60s Claudia would find steady work on both sides of the Atlantic. She co-starred with such Hollywood leading men as John Wayne (1964’s Circus World), Rock Hudson (Blindfold in 1965), Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin (1966’s The Professionals), and Tony Curtis (Don’t Make Waves in 1967). At the same time she won acclaim for her title turn in Visconti’s Sandra (1965), a modern retelling of the Ancient Greek story of Elektra. She appeared with fellow screen sirens Vitti, Capucine, and Raquel Welch in the anthology film The Queens (1966), and then co-starred with Franco Nero in the Sicilian-set crime thriller The Day of the Owl (1968) by Damiano Damiani. Cardinale’s twin career tracks merged in 1968 when she played a widowed homesteader on the American frontier in Sergio Leone’s brutal drama Once Upon a Time in the West, with Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, and Jason Robards.
The 1970s and ’80s found Cardinale spending more time in Europe and focusing on her turbulent four-decade relationship with Italian director Pasquale Squitieri, for whom she appeared in several films. She teamed up with her childhood idol, French actress Brigitte Bardot, in the 1973 western send-up The Legend of Frenchie King. Two years later she and Vitti co-starred in the action romp Blonde in Black Leather. Claudia appeared as the adultress threatened with stoning with Franco Zeffirelli’s 1977 TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth. And she was part of an all-star cast that included Roger Moore, Telly Savalas, and her Pink Panther colleague David Niven in the 1979 WWII actioner Escape to Athena. Her best-known ’80s role came in Werner Herzog’s problem-plagued 1982 drama Fitzcarraldo. As Molly, a brothel owner and the love interest of the title protagonist (Klaus Kinski), she inspires Fitzcarraldo to try to build an opera house in a town in Peru’s Amazon basin.
In 1993 Cardinale returned to the Pink Panther universe, playing the mother of bumbling lawman Jacques Gambrelli (Roberto Begnini) in Son of the Pink Panther, director Blake Edwards’ final film. Over the next two decades she worked with such notable filmmakers as France’s Claude Lelouch (2002’s And Now…Ladies and Gentlemen) and Portugal’s Manoel de Oliveira (2012’s Gebo and the Shadow), and in 2014 she co-starred with Dakota Fanning in the British biodrama Effie Gray. Cardinale’s final film role brought her back to her birthplace, co-starring in the Italian/Tunisian drama The Island of Forgiveness in 2022.
A longtime resident of the French town of Nemours in northern France’s Île-de-France region, Cardinale died there on September 23rd. Of her approach to acting, she once said in an interview, “If you want to practice this craft, you have to have inner strength. Otherwise, you’ll lose your idea of who you are. Every film I make entails becoming a different woman. And in front of a camera, no less! But when I’m finished, I’m me again.”