What made her rare was that, for all her beauty, she refused the compromises others accepted.
The camera never lied about Claudia Cardinale. How could it? Cinema’s greatest maestros saw in her not merely an actress but an ideal, a figure hovering at the border of myth. Yet for all the grandeur projected onto her, she lived her life with a certain rootedness. That life closed its circle Tuesday in Nemours, France. She was 87, survived by her two children, Patrick and Claudia.
Few actors ever get a chance to step into films that feel destined for immortality. Cardinale did it three times — 8 ½, The Leopard, and Once Upon a Time in the West — each opposite men carved out of confidence: Mastroianni, Delon, Lancaster, Robards, Fonda, Bronson. She matched them frame for frame. Though nicknamed “Italy’s Girlfriend,” she was never ornamental. Her presence drew not only the gaze but the drama around her.
In Federico Fellini’s dreamscape, she was Guido’s imagined salvation; in Luchino Visconti’s epic, she was the young outsider whose beauty unsettles a decaying aristocracy; and in Sergio Leone’s homage to the American West, she portrayed Jill, whose arrival at the train depot — set to the theme that bears her name — remains one of the most unforgettable sequences in cinema. The Italian director later said she was the film’s “motor”: remove her, and the engine behind the finest Western ever made stalls.
She appeared in more than 100 films across six decades, from Rocco and His Brothers to Fitzcarraldo, but her beginnings were far from glamorous. Born in Tunis to Sicilian parents on April 15, 1938, Claude Joséphine Rose Cardinale grew up speaking French and entered cinema by chance, after a beauty contest sent her to Venice. “I wasn’t speaking a word of Italian until I was 18,” she recalled. “They had to dub my voice in my first Italian picture!” Within a few years she was at the heart of European cinema.
What made her rare was that, for all her beauty, she refused the compromises others accepted. “I never did a nude scene, and I never did anything to change my face or my body,” the Pink Panther star once said. “There’s nothing wrong with old age.” She also turned down the trappings of Hollywood: “I also never had a bodyguard or a driver, simply because I always like to be who I am.” That refusal to pretend, to live any way but as herself, is part of why her image endures and why it feels right to keep her close.
I display a handful of framed stills from favorite films in my living room, rotating them with the seasons. For the past few months, Cardinale has presided above our sofa as Angelica Sedara in The Leopard’s legendary ball sequence. She leans lightly into Tancredi (Alain Delon) while the Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster) fixes his gaze on her — the triangle of youth, beauty, and waning power caught in a single instant. If you haven’t seen it, you really should. It’s one of cinema’s most Burkean expressions, a lesson in how to meet change with grace, with Cardinale radiant at the center.
To fully appreciate her power on screen, turn to Leone’s masterpiece. The closing moments of Once Upon a Time in the West feel like a hymn: The railroad stretches across the horizon, the outpost hardens into the edge of civilization, and the woman he called “the matriarch” of the West stands at its threshold, offering water to the men driving the country’s expansion. A few minutes earlier, Jason Robards’s Cheyenne had teased her, “If one of them should, uh, pat your behind, just make believe it’s nothing. They earned it.”
None of them dares. They just take the water, respecting her place among them, as the camera lingers and Ennio Morricone’s soaring score lifts her into eternity, where she lives on.
Grazie di tutto, bellissima.