Italian actress Claudia Cardinale has died at 87, following a glittering decades-long film career in both Hollywood and Europe.
In English, her best-loved roles include reformed prostitute Jill in the 1968 spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West, as well as an exiled princess who owns the world’s biggest diamond in the 1963 comedy The Pink Panther with David Niven.
Meanwhile in Italy she was known for dazzling performances in such movies as Luchino Visconti’s sweeping period drama The Leopard – a major influence on The Godfather – as well as the Federico Fellini classic 8½.
The peak of her global stardom was the 1960s, when French and Italian cinema exploded dazzlingly across the world stage, and she acted with such leading men as Henry Fonda, Marcello Mastroianni, Alain Delon and Sean Connery.
Cardinale died with her children present this Tuesday in the French commune of Nemours near Paris, her agent Laurent Savry told AFP.
‘She leaves us the legacy of a free and inspired woman both as a woman and as an artiste,’ Savry said in a message announcing her passing.
Italian actress Claudia Cardinale has died at 87, following a glittering decades-long film career in both Hollywood and Europe
Born to a Sicilian family in French Tunisia, she spoke almost no Italian when she won a contest in 1955 to be named ‘most beautiful Italian woman in Tunis’ and attended the Venice Film Festival as her reward.
She wore her bikini on the Lido and left producers enraptured, but movies at that point held no temptation for her and she rebuffed their professional advances.
‘I was very young, fierce, modest, almost wild. And without the slightest desire to exhibit myself on film sets,’ she told Le Monde in 2017.
Cardinale wanted to become a teacher, but at age 19 she was raped by a Frenchman and fell pregnant with her son Patrick, so she signed with Italian producer Franco Cristaldi and entered showbiz in Rome to make enough money to support her son.
‘It was for him that I did it. For Patrick, this baby that I wanted to keep despite the circumstances and the enormous scandal that an out-of-wedlock birth could cause at the time,’ she recalled decades later.
She gave birth in secret and, on Cristaldi’s advice, pretended throughout her early career that Patrick was her brother, concealing the truth even from her son.
‘I filmed pregnant, but no one noticed, because the waistband of dresses at the time were right under the bust,’ she explained.
Cardinale had already made her debut with a small part in the 1958 movie Goha led by Omar Sharif, and that same year in Rome she entered the Italian scene with another minor role in the classic ensemble comedy caper Big Deal on Madonna Street.
She filmed well into her final trimester of pregnancy and then – depressed to the point of suicidal ideation – she asked the producer to let her out of her contract, whereupon he discreetly arranged for her to give birth to Patrick in London.
