Thinking back on her legacy, Cardinale once recalled: “The best compliment I ever got was from actor David Niven while filming The Pink Panther. He said: ‘Claudia, along with spaghetti, you’re Italy”s greatest invention.’”
Despite representing the Italian cinematic epoch, Claude Joséphine Rose Cardinale was born and raised in Tunis, Tunisia to a family of Sicilian descent, and grew up speaking French, Arabic, and the Sicilian dialect. She took up Italian as an adult. (Some of her first major films had to be dubbed because her Italian wasn’t deemed good enough). After winning the “Most Beautiful Italian Girl in Tunisia” competition in 1957, she was sent to the Venice Film Festival. Bikini-clad on the lido, she received several offers of roles.
She took some small parts, rejected more, and returned to Tunisia to her family—unconcerned with the cinema “thing.” As a teenager, she was raped and became pregnant. She gave birth to her son Patrick in 1957 in London, and at the advice of her parents, pretended he was her brother. She was signed to the the film studio of Italian producer Franco Cristaldi—who she later married—and became known as Claudia Cardinale.
Cardinale slowly began building up stellar parts, in movies like Mario Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street and Bolognini’s Golden Leopard-winning Il bell’Antonio. Her big break came when she appeared in Fellini’s Oscar-winning 8 1/2 and the epic Visconti classic The Leopard. The Pink Panther quickly followed to propel her to global stardom.
Taking up temporary residence in Hollywood, Cardinale starred as John Wayne and Rita Hayworth’s daughter in Circus World, and took on her most remembered English language role as a former sex worker in Once Upon a Time in the West with Henry Fonda.
Cardinale and Cristaldi divorced in 1975, and she began a life-long relationship with director Pasquale Squitieri. They were together until his death in 2017 and shared a daughter, also named Claudia. Cristaldi and Cardinale worked on movies together including I guappi, Corleone Claretta, and Atto di dolore. Often, Squitieri directed her in stage productions. Acting until late in life, one of Cardinale’s last credits was in the Swiss television series Bulle, in 2020.
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