Italian screen legend Claudia Cardinale has died at the age of 87 in her home in Nemours, near Paris, surrounded by her children, reports The WP Times. The news of her death was confirmed on September 23 by her agent, Laurent Savary.
Born on April 15, 1938, in Tunis to a Sicilian family, Cardinale’s entry into the world of cinema began after she won a beauty contest that led her to the Venice Film Festival, where she received her first film offer.
Her early career was marked by hardship. Cardinale revealed years later that she had been assaulted, became pregnant, and decided to raise her child. For a time, her son Patrick was publicly presented as her younger brother to protect her career. “I was forced to accept this lie to avoid scandal and safeguard my work,” she once said.
At the beginning of her career, she was dubbed in many productions because she did not speak Italian. “At 20 I became a fairy tale heroine, a symbol of a country whose language I barely spoke,” she recalled in her 2005 autobiography My Stars. Her real voice was first heard in Federico Fellini’s masterpiece 8½, released when she was 25. That same year, she starred in Luchino Visconti’s celebrated film The Leopard. “Visconti wanted me as a brunette with long hair, Fellini imagined me as a blonde,” she remembered.
Throughout her career, Cardinale appeared in over 120 films, including Blake Edwards’ The Pink Panther, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, and Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Red Tent. She shared the screen with world cinema icons such as Marcello Mastroianni, Henry Fonda, Marlon Brando, Alain Delon, Sean Connery, and Burt Lancaster.
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