Claudia Cardinale obituary: international star who worked with Fellini, Leone and Visconti
Cardinale, who has died aged 87, was one of the defining faces of postwar European film, a performer of magnetic presence and emotional depth who appeared in several classics of world cinema.
Sergio Leone’s epic 1968 western Once upon a Time in the West is a film with several memorable main character introductions. Whether it’s our first glimpse of Charles Bronson’s mysterious ‘Man with the Harmonica’ or Henry Fonda’s blue-eyed villain Frank, each camera move, each gesture is elegantly and precisely choreographed to Ennio Morricone’s multi-textured score.
Leone saves the most haunting introduction for Claudia Cardinale’s Jill McBain. Jill is first seen as she steps off a train at a busy station. Expecting to be met by her husband and family, she wanders among the bustle of travellers. Gradually however, as the crowd thins out, she realises that something isn’t quite right, a realisation mirrored on the soundtrack as Morricone’s initial jaunty barroom piano piece (‘Bad Orchestra’) morphs into the more melancholic ‘Jill’s Theme’.
By the time Cardinale appeared in Once upon a Time in the West, she had been an international star for over a decade and had acted in over three dozen films, many of which are now considered classics of world cinema. Born in Tunisia to a Sicilian family in 1938, Cardinale was crowned the country’s ‘Most Beautiful Italian Girl’ at an event which took place in the seaside town of Gammarth when she was 18.
This led to an invitation to the 1957 Venice Film Festival where she met Franco Cristaldi, the producer who would launch her career and with whom she would become romantically involved. “More than a contract with Cristaldi, it was a book,” Cardinale later wrote in her 1995 memoir. “Page after page in which everything was specified down to the last millimetre. An infinity of clauses which stated I could not change anything of my physical appearance, I could not cut my hair. In other words, I no longer controlled my body or my thoughts.”
Despite this almost suffocating control, Cardinale felt great loyalty to Cristaldi, an indebtedness to him. He had been one of the few people to help her during one of the most difficult, traumatic periods of her life. In 1958, just months after signing her contract, she gave birth to a son, Patrick. The baby was born after Cardinale was raped by an older French man who had stalked and preyed on her back in Tunisia. Motherhood and film stardom were not deemed compatible – especially under the terms of her contract – and Cardinale was initially forced to acknowledge Patrick as a younger brother rather than a son. She would remain under contract to Cristaldi’s company Vides until 1975.
During this time, Cardinale got the chance to work with many top-tier filmmakers, both in Europe and the US. 1963 is often referred to as her annus mirabilis – it was the year she starred in both Luchino Visconti’s Sicily-set period drama The Leopard and Federico Fellini’s dream-like filmmaking satire 8 ½. She worked on the two projects simultaneously, changing her hair colour from dark brown for Visconti to blonde for Fellini and back again multiple times. “On Visconti’s set, the atmosphere was church-like in its seriousness, there was no joking or laughing,” she recalled. “Fellini on the other hand could only create in complete chaos and confusion.”
Cardinale’s brooding beauty bewitched many writers and critics, perhaps most infamously, the novelist Alberto Moravia (The Conformist, Contempt) who interviewed her for Esquire magazine in May 1961. Titled ‘The Next Love Goddess’, Moravia’s piece took objectification to a whole new level in its ‘phenomenological’ approach, closely focusing as it did on Cardinale’s body in minute detail, from her hair to her toes. A more compassionate interview from this period came from L’Europeo’s Oriana Fallaci: “I listened to [Cardinale’s] raspy voice, so raspy for that face that was still so child-like, and a chill went through me. I was tempted to help her escape back to Tunisia where the sun was sweet and she was still an adolescent with no money and no fame and free from the prison that money and fame brings.”
Closest to Cardinale in terms of other Italian female stars of her generation was probably Monica Vitti (L’avventura, Red Desert). The pair starred together in Carlo Di Palma’s 1975 road movie The Adventure Starts Here and they were both versatile enough as performers to excel in both serious arthouse drama and outlandish comedy. While Vitti’s final screen appearances came in the early 1990s, Cardinale worked consistently for an extraordinary eight decades – well into the 2020s.
Her most frequent collaborator post-1975 was Pasquale Squitieri, the Neapolitan filmmaker who became her partner (the couple had a daughter in 1979, also named Claudia). “As soon as I saw Pasquale, I knew that he would be a bridge towards a life that felt more my own,” Cardinale wrote in 1995, “I felt that he could help me rediscover the carefree happiness I left behind in Africa all those years before.”
- Claudia Cardinale, 15 April 1938 to 23 September 2025