Italian-Tunisian actress who died on September 23rd 2025, aged 87. She made more than 100 films over a career spanning decades.
Born in Tunisia, Cardinale grew up speaking French, Sicilian dialect and Arabic. Although an Italian citizen, the French liked to claim her, and awarded her the Légion d'Honneur. At 19 she was crowned "most beautiful Italian girl in Tunisia", a title she had not sought. The prize was a trip to the Venice Film Festival, where she posed on the Lido in an emerald-green bikini and told the media she did not want to be an actress.
Her lucky-star year was 1963, when she played the female lead in both Federico Fellini's "8½" and Luchino Visconti's "The Leopard". In "The Leopard" she played a debutante loved by two men in an aristocratic Sicilian family in steep decline; in "8½" she was the Ideal Woman who alone could save a film director from breakdown. Her early films were dubbed, even "The Pink Panther", in which she played the sozzled Princess Dala; Fellini freed her in "8½" to use her own voice, which was throaty, husky and dark.
She starred in Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West" as Jill McBain, a woman defending her property against murderous bandits. Leone insisted that Ennio Morricone's score was played before each scene to put his actors in the right mood. Of all his characters, Leone said, only Claudia knew she would come out alive.
In 1981 she appeared in Werner Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo" in the Amazon jungle, partnering the seriously deranged Klaus Kinski.
She refused to sign an exclusive contract with Universal in Hollywood, preferring independence. She also refused ever to be filmed naked.
At 19 she was signed to Franco Cristaldi's studio for seven years. Cristaldi was 14 years her senior and controlled her weight, hair and friends, paying her by the month rather than by the film. She had a son, Patrick, whom Cristaldi made her conceal; the boy was given to her parents to raise as her younger brother. She eventually married Cristaldi, though not in Italy and so not officially, and divorced him in 1975, never to marry again.
Her later partner was the director Pasquale Squitieri, with whom she lived largely apart — he in Rome and she just outside Paris — for some 40 years. In Squitieri's film "Claretta", she played the mistress of Mussolini.
It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you look playing the game.