Claudia Cardinale, actress who was ‘Italy’s girlfriend,’ is dead at 87

Claudia Cardinale in a 1960 publicity photo (Wikipedia)

By NINA SIEGAL

Claudia Cardinale, a leading lady of Italian cinema in the 1960s, whose voluptuous beauty was celebrated by 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. Cardinale had lived in Nemours, south of Paris, in recent years.

Cardinale appeared in more than 150 movies during her six-decade career in Europe. She also starred in a number of Hollywood films, including Blake Edwards’ comedy classic “The Pink Panther.”

She was Marcello Mastroianni’s feminine ideal in Fellini’s “8 1/2,” 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 Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West.”

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 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 nation’s 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 few 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,’” 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, she gave birth to a son, Patrick, in London. Given the circumstances, her parents raised him as her younger brother; they did not tell him the truth until he was 8 years old.

That year, 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 comedic crime story “Big Deal on Madonna Street,”, directed by Mario Monicelli and released in 1958. She starred in several major films in quick succession, including, in 1963, Fellini’s Oscar-winning “8 1/2” and Visconti’s “The Leopard.”

“Then she just became known as ‘Italy’s girlfriend,’ the girl of your dreams,” Benvegnù said.

Cardinale also starred in Luigi Comencini’s “La Ragazza di Bube,” or “Bebo’s Girl” (1964), a commercial and critical success; it earned her Italy’s Nastro d’Argento award for best actress, her first prestigious acting honor. She played Mara, a peasant girl from Tuscany who, at the end of World War II, falls in love with a young partisan (George Chakiris) who must go into hiding after being accused of involvement in a double homicide.

She married Cristaldi in Las Vegas, in 1966. But she did not consider the marriage “official,” Squitieri said, even though Cristaldi gave her son his last name.

In the Fellini film, set in a luxurious spa, Cardinale played an actress and muse figure (also named Claudia) to the protagonist, a director named Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni). He sees her as embodying his ideal woman and envisions her as the ingénue of a science fiction film he plans to make.

In Visconti’s period drama “The Leopard,” she played a young Sicilian debutante who quickly wins the hearts of 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, Cardinale took a comic turn when she worked for the first time with an American director, Blake Edwards. She played a princess who loses a precious jewel in “The Pink Panther,” which also starred Peter Sellers, David Niven and Robert Wagner.

Another career-defining role for Cardinale came in 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, 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.”

Cardinale divorced Cristaldi around 1975 to live with Pasquale Squitieri, an independent filmmaker who was known as a right-leaning provocateur. “In a sense, she wanted to emancipate herself,” Monda said. “She didn’t want to be thought of as only the product of a great producer.”

In later interviews, Cardinale described her relationship with 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 Squitieri led to what Cardinale called their effective blackballing from the Italian film industry. She said she left for France to restart her career, taking supporting roles.

Cardinale appeared in almost a dozen of 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,” Claudia Squitieri said of her parents, who lived together until 1989 and remained extremely close afterward.

Cardinale also appeared as part of an all-star cast in the 1977 television miniseries “Jesus of Nazareth,” directed by Franco Zeffirelli. She played an adulteress who is threatened with stoning.

Early in her career, Cardinale had modeled herself on Bardot, her co-star in the 1971 French western comedy “Les Pétroleuses” (“The Legend of Frenchie King”), directed by Christian-Jaque. That film, which parodied Hollywood tropes, included all-female shootouts and a rough-and-tumble fistfight between the two leading ladies.

“Bardot was her idol,” Squitieri said. “Everyone was expecting a big rivalry between them, but they actually became very good friends.”

In Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo” (1982), Cardinale, though in a supporting role (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 on screen 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 New York 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 Cardinale a host of new admirers, putting her on film producers’ and casting directors’ radar once more for years to come.