CLAUDIA CARDINALE
(15 April 1938 – 23 September 2025)
Claudia Josephine Rose Cardinale was born in La Goulette near Tunis to Francesco Cardinale, a railway worker from Sicily, and his wife Yolanda Greco. Claudia only spoke French at first, or her parents’ Sicilian language, and never spoke Italian until she made Italian films. She was educated in Carthage and then studied to become a teacher and was a wild child obsessed by Brigitte Bardot. She made a film with her schoolfriends which was seen at the Berlin Festival, giving her some kind of celebrity status. The French director Jacques Baratier then saw her and cast her in a small part in his Franco-Tunisian drama Goha with Omar Sharif, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes. In Tunis she was raped and became pregnant, but she decided to keep the child, Patrick – whom she passed off as her younger brother. She then signed a seven-year contract with the Italian producer Franco Cristaldi, who agreed to adopt the child as his own.
In 1959 she was cast in the British comedy Upstairs and Downstairs with Michael Craig and Anne Heywood, although some of her dialogue was dubbed as her Italian accent was deemed to be impenetrable. Her career progressed well when she was cast opposite Marcello Mastroianni in Mauro Bolognini’s Franco-Italian Il bel’Antonio, which collected the Golden Leopard at Locarno, and she said it was the best time of her career as she admired the director enormously (but ignored Mastroianni’s protestations of love). Then she worked for Abel Gance in Austerlitz (1960) opposite Pierre Mondy and Leslie Caron and appeared in Luchino Visconti’s classic Rocco and His Brothers, with Alain Delon, which picked up the Special Jury Prize and FIPRESCI Prize at Venice. She continued to get good roles such as in Valerio Zurlini’s Girl with a Suitcase, about teenage pregnancy, Bolognini’s The Lovemakers with Jean-Paul Belmondo and again with him in Cartouche, a period adventure that made her a star in France.
The year of 1963 saw Cardinale in some further high-profile productions such as Visconti’s The Leopard (based on the Lampedusa novel) with Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon which led to Fellini’s 8½. Both films were made concurrently, involving moving from one location to another with an immense difference in atmosphere. Visconti was quiet and totally prepared, whereas Fellini was all over the place with off-the-cuff improvisation. Her first Hollywood film was Henry Hathaway’s Circus World (aka The Magnificent Showman, 1964) with John Wayne and Rita Hayworth. Claudia and Rita played a mother and daughter circus act. Cardinale was cast again by Visconti for his Holocaust survivor film Sandra (Of a Thousand Delights) and then she made Blindfold with Rock Hudson, Lost Command with Anthony Quinn, Alain Delon and George Segal, and, best of all, she was in Richard Brooks’ Western The Professionals with Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin and Robert Ryan. With Tony Cutis she was in Alexander Mackendrick’s Don’t Make Waves, a comedy that didn’t quite make any sort of waves, but she gave one of her best performances in Sergio Leone’s epic Western Once Upon a Time in the West, proving she was a beauty with balls and in which she secured top-billing above Henry Fonda, Jason Robards and Charles Bronson.
She continued making films in the 1970s – Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Adventures of Gerard (based on a Conan Doyle story), appeared with Bardot in The Legend of Frenchie King, and was in Franco Zeffirelli’s miniseries Jesus of Nazareth as ‘the Adulteress’, with Robert Powell in the title role. In 1982 she played a brothel owner in Werner Herzog’s troubled epic Fitzcarraldo, with Klaus Kinski, set in Peru. She was never short of work in Italy or elsewhere and she built up a cv of well over a hundred performances. Many of her films may not have been seen outside of Italy but she still gained a world reputation as a fine actress and great beauty. Among her last films she played a Viscountess in Richard Laxton’s Effie Gray (2014), based on John Ruskin’s disastrous marriage, with Dakota Fanning in the title role. Cardinale’s final film role was in The Island of Forgiveness (2022), suitably a Tunisian-Italian drama about a successful author who returns to Tunisia to scatter his mother’s ashes.
She was romantically involved with Franco Cristaldi from 1966 to 1975 and subsequently with the director Pasquale Squitieri, by whom she had a daughter, Claudia. In 1979 she became a grandmother to Lucilla, the daughter of her son Patrick. She won many international film awards, mainly from Italy. In 1993 she received an honorary Golden Lion at the Venice Festival and an honorary Golden Bear at Berlin in 2002. She was a world player and an actress who will always be remembered not only for her feistiness but also for her undoubted beauty.
MICHAEL DARVELL