Italian actress Claudia Cardinale, known for her roles in The Leopard and Once Upon a Time in the West has died. She was 87.
The actress died in Nemours near Paris, with her children by her side, her agent told French news agency AFP.
Born in Tunis on 15 April 1938 to Sicilian parents, Cardinale grew up in the Tunisian capital speaking French, Arabic and Sicilian dialect.
She got her big break when she won the “Most Beautiful Italian Girl in Tunisia” in 1957 which came with a trip to the Venice Film Festival, where she caught the attention of various film producers.
Cardinale made her big screen debut in the 1958 film Goha, starring Omar Sharif, and never looked back. In her early prime, she was regarded as one of the great European stars of the 1960s, alongside the likes of Alain Delon, with whom she appeared in Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and The Leopard (1963), famously playing Angelica in the latter opposite Delon’s Tancredi.
Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale in ‘The Leopard ‘
©20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved/courtesy Everett Collection
Other early roles included Valerio Zurlini’s Girl With A Suitcase (1961) and Philippe de Broca’s adventure film Cartouche (1962), in which she starred opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2.
Behind the fairytale ascent to fame, Cardinale’s personal life was complicated due to an unplanned pregnancy just as her career was taking off.
The actress wanted to keep both the child and her career. Producer Franco Cristaldi, to whom Cardinale was under contract, dispatched her to London to give birth, putting out the world publicly that she had gone to the UK to learn English for an upcoming role.
Her son Patrick spent his early childhood with her parents and sister, unaware Cardinale was his mother for the first seven years of his life.
Cardinale also broke out internationally, appearing opposite David Niven in The Pink Panther in 1963, and would spend most of the rest of the decade in Hollywood, starring in films such as Blindfold (1965) opposite Rock Hudson; Lost Command (1966), alongside Anthony Quinn and Delon; The Professionals (1966), reuniting her with The Leopard star Burt Lancaster and Don’t Make Waves (1967) with Tony Curtis.
That period also saw her star in Sergio Leone’s Western Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), as the female protagonist, widowed homesteader Jill Mcbain, alongside Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson.
Claudia Cardinale and Henry Fonda in ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’
Cardinale returned to Europe in the 1970s, a decade in which her notable credits included Luigi Zampa’s romantic comedy A Girl In Australia, in which she co-starred opposite Alberto Sordi; crime drama Hit Man, reuniting her with Belmondo; Pasquale Squitieri’s Mafia drama Corleone, and George P. Cosmatos’ World War Two adventure Escape To Athena, featuring Roger Moore and Niven in the cast.
The 1980s saw her win praise for her performance as Claretta Petacci, the mistress of Benito Mussolini, in Squitieri’s Claretta (1984), while other credits of note included Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo as the love interest of Klaus Kinski.
Over the course of her career, Cardinale racked up 128 credits. Her last big screen appearance was in Ridha Behi’s 2022 Italian-Tunisian drama The Island of Forgiveness.
The tale of a Rome-based Tunisian writer of Italian descent who returns to Tunisia to scatter his mother’s ashes reconnected Cardinale with the land of her birth.
Cardinale was feted by the Venice Film Festival with a Career Golden Lion in 2002 and received an Honorary Golden Bear at the Berlinale in 2002.
An active feminist, Cardinale was a UNESCO goodwill ambassador for the Defense of Women’s Rights from 2000, while in 2011, she was named by The Los Angeles Times Magazine as one of the 50 most beautiful women in the history of cinema.
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