The embodiment of Latin sensuality and star of numerous Italian cinema classics, actress Claudia Cardinale died on Tuesday, September 23, at the age of 87, her agent announced to Agence France-Presse. She passed away in Nemours (south of Paris), where she lived, he said.

Cardinale was born in Tunis on April 15, 1938, to Sicilian parents who had immigrated at the time of the French protectorate. A feisty, rebellious and withdrawn young girl, she loved sports and wanted to be a teacher. Strict and hostile to all makeup, her father, a railway engineer, nevertheless agreed to let her appear, at the age of 14, with her sister and classmates, all veiled, in a short documentary film by René Vautier called Anneaux d'or ("Golden Rings").

Noticed in this first film by Omar Sharif, she was asked to play the maid of an Arab artist in Goha, by Jacques Baratier. At 18, having been voted "most beautiful Italian woman in Tunis," she won a trip to the Venice Film Festival, from which she returned still determined to teach, but bombarded with telegrams and proposals.

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