Once Upon A Time In The West star Claudia Cardinale dead at 87: Italian screen siren of 1960s passes away

Italian actress Claudia Cardinale has died at 87, following a decades-long film career that spanned both Hollywood and Europe.

Her best-loved roles in English include a prostitute turned rancher in the 1968 spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West, as well as a drunken princess who owns the world’s biggest diamond in the 1963 comedy The Pink Panther.

Meanwhile in Italy she was known for luminous 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 stardom was the 1960s, when French and Italian cinema exploded dazzlingly across the world stage, and she acted with leading men like Henry Fonda, John Wayne, Marcello Mastroianni, Alain Delon, Burt Lancaster and Sean Connery.

Cardinale died with her children present this Tuesday in the 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.

Born to a Sicilian family in French Tunisia in 1938, she spoke 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.

In her bikini on the Lido, she had producers and the press enraptured, but movies held no temptation for her and she swatted aside the job offers she got. 

‘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.

‘It’s my sister Blanche, blonde with blue eyes, who dreamed of doing films. Me, the brunette with dark eyes who was called “the Berber,” I saw myself more as a teacher in the desert or an explorer discovering the world.’

However 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 child.

‘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 his early childhood 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 film industry with another minor role in the 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 arranged for her to quietly give birth to Patrick in London. 

Cardinale wound up in an 18-year contract with Cristaldi and ultimately became romantically involved with him, though whether they legally married is disputed.

‘It was a strange time, you know, when actors were totally dependent on a producer with whom they were under contract, so their hands and feet were tied,’ she said.

‘I very quickly had a string of successes, made four films a year, but I stayed employed like a simple employee and was not free to decide when I went out, when I wore makeup, or when I ran my personal life.’

After delivering Patrick and leaving him in the care of her family, she plunged headlong into Italian cinema and worked vigorously to earn money for her child, establishing herself as one of the era’s femme fatales.

In the 1960 drama Il bell’Antonio, she was so captivating that her co-star Marcello Mastroianni fell in love with her in real life, only for her to reject him, dismissing him as the sort of actor who always became besotted with his leading ladies.

Also in 1960, she acted in Luchino Vischonti’s social drama Rocco and His Brothers, marking her first collaboration with the director and with heartthrob Alain Delon.

In 1961, she finally attained recognition as not only a bona fide star but also a well-regarded serious actress, thanks to Valerio Zurlini’s film Girl with a Suitcase.

Cardinale led the film as a young nightclub singer who became a mother as a teenager, a character close enough to her actual life that she brought a striking authenticity to the role – but also needed months before filming to steel herself for the mental pressures of reenacting problems that so acutely mirrored her own.

Showered with praise by the critics, she entered a period of stardom that encompassed not only Europe but also the United States and the Soviet Union. 

In 1963 she featured in Vischonti’s seminal historical drama The Leopard, about the upheaval in Sicily amid the reunification of Italy in the 1960s.

Cardinale played the beautiful aristocrat Angelica, who becomes involved with Alain Delon’s Tancredi, a wheeler-dealer with enough ruthlessness to deftly take advantage of the ructions engulfing the Italian peninsula.

Burt Lancaster led the film as Tancredi’s uncle and Angelica’s godfather Don Fabrizio, an aging relic of a courtlier era, whose final dance with Angelica is a moment of both sizzling chemistry and aching wistfulness for the decaying world of the nobility.

She launched herself in Hollywood in Blake Edwards’ original 1963 comedy The Pink Panther, alongside Peter Sellers as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau.

Cardinale – whose voice was dubbed – featured as the exiled Princess Dala who owns the world’s biggest diamond, acting alongside David Niven and Robert Wagner.

The year 1963 also saw Cardinale featured in the cast of Federico Fellini’s opus 8½, a semi-autobiographical piece about a movie director haunted by the memories of all the women who had a pivotal impact on his life.

Mastroianni led the cast as filmmaker Guido Anselmi with Cardinale as one of his actresses, amid a glittering array of the era’s European stars like Anouk Aimée as his estranged wife and Sandra Milo as his mistress.

Cardinale had to film The Leopard and 8½ ‘at the same time,’ she shared later, embarking on the ‘crazy’ task of dashing between the sets to make both pictures.

Although she was Sicilian by ethnicity, her upbringing in Tunisia meant that she grew up speaking French and Arabic and had to be dubbed in her early Italian films because of her shaky grasp of the language.

‘For The Leopard, I spoke French with Alain Delon and English with Burt Lancaster. It was Fellini, for 8½, who required that I act in Italian, even if it meant having a French accent,’ she said, describing the two projects as the ‘most important films of my life.’

The 1960s proved to be a galloping decade for Cardinale’s career, with highlights including Sergio Leone’s 1968 epic Once Upon a Time in the West.

In a top-flight cast including Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson and Jason Robards, Cardinale was a standout as reformed prostitute Jill McBain, who during the time of the film’s events is the indomitable widow of a murdered rancher.

Robards’ outlaw character Cheyenne has a famous line in which he tells her: ‘You know, Jill, you remind me of my mother. She was the biggest w**** in Alameda and the finest woman that ever lived. Whoever my father was – for an hour or for a month – he must have been a happy man.’

Cardinale remembered that she shot ‘a very hot love scene with Henry Fonda’ in the picture, but his fifth wife Shirlee Mae Adams was ‘standing like a vulture next to the camera’ and ‘looked at me with such hatred that I was paralyzed.’

In 1969 she was part of an all-star international cast in Soviet director Mikhail Kalatozov’s adventure drama The Red Tent, about an airship that crashed during a North Pole expedition during the 1920s.

Cardinale can be seen as a nurse who falls desperately in love with one of the crew members and throws herself into the rescue mission, pulling whatever strings she can to help influence the efforts to bring her paramour back alive.

Her co-stars in the film included Peter Finch and Sean Connery, as well as German actor Hardy Krüger, Italian heartthrob Massimo Girotti and Soviet performers like Otar Koberidze, Eduard Martsevich and future Burnt by the Sun director Nikita Mikhalkov.

By 1975, Cardinale was fed up of Cristaldi and managed to extricate herself from both their professional contract and their personal relationship.

She had already become involved with Italian filmmaker Pasquale Squitieri in 1974, and they enjoyed a long artistic and romantic bond until his death in 2017.

He directed her in movies like the 1978 mafia drama Corleone, as well as the 1984 film Claretta in which she played Benito Mussolini’s mistress.

‘At first, Franco Cristaldi was furious and tried to block us professionally, because he was powerful and controlled the entire Italian film industry,’ Cardinale noted later. 

The 1970s and 1980s were a spottier period of her career, with misfires including a comedy western with Brigitte Bardot called Les Petroleuses.

Cardinale even joined the trend of actresses cutting sporadic disco records, such as the 1977 release Love Affair, which did achieve financial success.

Fame was a vehicle to achieve her other ambitions, as she said in 2013: ‘When I was young, my dream was to explore the world. And I did it,’ via the Guardian.

Her later projects include the 1982 Werner Herzog epic Fitcarraldo, the hit 1977 miniseries Jesus of Nazareth, and the 2010 Turkish movie Signora Enrica, for which she won best actress at a now-defunct film festival in Antalya.

Cardinale continued acting into her final years, playing a crime boss in Netflix’ 2020 French drama Rogue City about an anti-gang police unit in Marseille. 

Despite rumors attaching her to stars ranging from Mastroianni to Jean-Paul Belmondo and Delon to Steve McQueen, she insisted she ‘never wanted to mix my work and my private life. No flirtation. No affair. The Italian has a strong temperament.’

She even spurned Marlon Brando, although he ‘was my idol when I was little in Tunis, in the same way as Brigitte Bardot. He knew it and one day he came knocking on my door in Hollywood to do a charming number on me and sleep with me.’

However she turned him down and he ‘quickly understood. “OK. You’re an Aries like me, aren’t you?” And he left. I almost felt a little regret. Even Pasquale, later, was stunned: “How did you manage to turn Brando down?”‘

Mastroianni meanwhile remained infatuated with Cardinale for years after she rejected him back in 1960, to the point ‘He even said it once on a TV show I was a guest on,’ she remembered decades later in 2017.

‘When I arrived, he rushed up to me and said: “I was so in love with you.” I said: “Stop it, Marcello! We’re live!” I was thinking of Catherine Deneuve, to whom he was married at the time. But he said: “I don’t care! I was madly in love!” It was kind but inept. Deneuve was furious and shunned me for a long time.’

However she used to walk ‘arm in arm’ with her ‘great gay friend’ Rock Hudson in order to give the public the impression of a romance, ‘because being gay in the cinema was the equivalent of a poison and could stop your career.’

She remained unsentimental about the ‘cannibalistic and thankless profession’ of moviemaking, particularly, she said, for actresses over 60.

‘I will always remember Rita Hayworth, whose daughter I played in Circus World with the great John Wayne,’ Cardinale said a few years ago, remembering a movie she made in 1964 during her early days in Hollywood. 

‘One day, she arrived in the small trailer that served as my dressing room. She looked at me and said: “You know, I was beautiful too.” And she burst into tears.’

In her later years, Cardinale’s own advice for young actresses was: ‘Be strong inside. Let go of roles quickly so as not to get lost in the characters. And stick to what they really are without mixing professional and private life. Don’t accept everything for a role that could damage you or make you feel like you’re selling yourself out.’ 

Along with Patrick, who took Cristaldi’s surname, Cardinale had a daughter called Claudia with Squitieri, whom she never married despite their decades together.