Back in the late 1980s, the venerable Public Theater on Manhattan’s Lafayette Street contained one rather nice movie emporium alongside its stage venues. A rep house, it seated maybe 300 souls and had a better-than-passably-large screen. It was there, I remember, that I saw a superb print of The Leopard, director Luchino Visconti’s 1963 epic, based on a landmark Italian novel, a tale of changing times in Sicily. Burt Lancaster headed its all-star cast. Alain Delon was the film’s more romantic male lead. 

About an hour into the movie, there’s a lunch held at the house of Lancaster’s Prince. Delon’s Tancredi, a nephew of the Prince, is much coveted by the Prince’s daughter, Concetta, played by Lucilla Morlacchi. One of the local movers and shakers shows up, and there’s much mirth made, before he gets up the stairs, of the fact that he’s wearing formal frack-tails to a lunch. The buffoonish Don Calogero apologizes to the Prince; his wife could not attend the lunch, so he’s brought his daughter Angelica instead. 

And so, her character looking very shy and nervous Claudia Cardinale appears. In the scene itself, the action and conversation stop; you can hear a pin drop in the on-screen room. (And it’s almost tragic the way that Concetta’s face falls.) At the Public Theater that afternoon, there was something like a collective gasp. Cardinale’s beauty in this scene, in the whole film, is such that it can seize audiences with a variant of Stendhal Syndrome — the condition in which too much beauty can make you faint. 

This is arguably the most extraordinary of all of the entrances Cardinale, who died yesterday at age 87, made in her long cinematic career (indeed, it’s one of the most extraordinary entrances in all of cinema), but ultimately, almost all of her entrances were at the very least noteworthy. Check her out in a clingy fuchsia knit sweater and matching cap as she shushes down an Italian Alp in the first Pink Panther film in 1963. Here she plays Princess Dala, the rightful owner of the title jewel coveted by master thief David Niven. (As self-possessed as her character is, she can’t help but fall for Niven’s charms, to the extent that she becomes his co-conspirator against Peter Sellers’ bumbling Inspector Clouseau. It’s complicated. Watch the movie.)  

Then there’s the way she shows up like an almost literal vision to beguile Marcello Mastroianni in Fellini’s 8 ½. It’s somewhat difficult to reckon, in today’s environment where it could be years between a single star’s vehicles, that all three of these Cardinale picture were released in the same year. Cardinale had to shuttle between the sets of the Visconti and Fellini pictures and get her hair color changed each time. Her beauty sometimes can blind viewers to just how committed an actress she was. In one of her earliest films, 1961’s Girl With A Suitcase, we’re introduced to her as she has her boyfriend stop their car on a lonely road; she then looks for a secluded spot in which she can pee. The action does nothing to stale her appeal or her infinite variety, needless to say. 

Cardinale’s star shone exceptionally bright in the ‘60s as she toggled between Hollywood and her homeland. (Actually, FYI, she wasn’t born in Italy but Tunisia, and she actually learned French well before she spoke Italian.) She made a strong impression as a purloined wife in Richard Brooks The Professionals, which re-teamed he with Lancaster, and was charming as a bohemian Malibu-ite in the underrated comedy Don’t Make Waves, costarring Tony Curtis and Sharon Tate. But her signature role of the decade was as Jill McBain in Sergio Leone’s 1969 epic Once Upon A Time In The West. Her character has married a man, Brett McBain, in New Orleans after a brief acquaintance; Brett’s attractiveness could well have something to do with his ownership of a piece of Western land, which he dubbed Sweetwater, and which will abut a new railway station. Before she can get out to Sweetwater, Henry Fonda’s diabolical Frank massacres Brett and his staff — and his little boy, a son from a prior marriage. Once Jill gets to Sweetwater, she has to connive Frank into not killing her as well, which she accomplishes partly by sleeping with him. For all Leone’s strengths as a filmmaker, creating nuanced female characters was pretty low on the list. Cardinale’s performance makes her character not just coherent but moving; the final scene, in which she distributes water to the laborers working to build the railroad, is actually tear-jerking. 

Hers was a protean career — she lived and worked long enough to costar in a Netflix movie, 2020’s Rogue City, playing, good grief, a drug gang matriarch. And while Visconti, Fellini and Blake Edwards are tough acts to follow, over the decades she worked with some of the most distinctive directors the world over: Jerzy Skolimowski (1970’s The Adventures of Gerard), Werner Herzog (the stupendous Fitzcarraldo, 1982) Marco Bellocchio (Henry IV, with 8 ½ costar Mastroianni), Manoel De Oliveira (Gebo and the Shadow, 2012). She even reunited with Blake Edwards for 1993’s Son of the Pink Panther. 

One of my favorite images of Cardinale comes not from a film but from a Richard Avedon photo shoot in 1967, around the time she was in the States filming Don’t Make Waves. Her partner for the snaps was Frank Zappa. Yes, that Frank Zappa. The duo, kitted out in psychedelic casual (Cardinale is apparently wearing boots borrowed from Zappa guitarist Elliot Ingber) look entirely simpatico as they no doubt exchange thoughts on their Italian roots. And the shots seem to show off Cardinale’s easy friendliness and playfulness. Few beauties could, or can, be so refreshingly unselfconscious.

I saw further evidence of that fact a few weeks ago in Venice, where the film festival there screened a restoration of the very broad 1964 Italian sex comedy The Magnificent Cuckold. Ugo Tognazzi plays a husband who sleeps around on his wife Maria (that’s Cardinale — and seriously, who sleeps around on Claudia Cardinale? Italian men are a trip…) and subsequently becomes paranoid that she’s cheating on him. Cardinale never did a nude scene once in her career, but boy did she come close in this, during the outlandish fantasies Tognazzi has imagining her adultery. Hopefully this spicy diversion will make it to the States; any and all additions to the available Cardinale filmography are more than welcome here. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you.