It was no surprise, when Federico Fellini cast Claudia Cardinale in 8½ (1963), that she played the dream girl of his alter ego on screen. By that time, Cardinale, who has died aged 87, had already emerged as a major Italian film star. In the same year, she appeared as the ravishing Sicilian courted by Alain Delon’s handsome Garibaldi officer in Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), Luchino Visconti’s great adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel.
Those who have seen the full-length version of the film will cherish the memory of Cardinale’s waltz with Burt Lancaster’s ageing prince. The film won Visconti the Palme d’Or at Cannes. By the end of the decade, Cardinale had become an international success, winning more praise by playing the only female role in Sergio Leone’s most ambitious western, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). She was cast as a former prostitute from New Orleans newly married to a good-hearted pioneer who has bought a piece of land, only to find she is a widow by the time she arrives to join him.
Leone and his cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli saw to it that Cardinale got her fair share of close-ups in a film in which most photographic attention was focused on the faces of her three impressive but impassive co-stars, Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson and Jason Robards, and the scenery of Monument Valley. The first day she and Fonda worked together was in the studio in Rome for their love scene. “It was very embarrassing for us both as the press were invited,” she said. “Henry admitted to me afterwards that it was the first time he had ever played a truly erotic scene in a film.”
The three films that had launched Cardinale as a new Italian star were all literary adaptations directed by Mauro Bolognini. In Il Bell’Antonio (1960), she was the unhappy wife of Marcello Mastroianni who, it becomes apparent, is impotent when confronted with her beauty; in La Viaccia (1961), she was a country girl who becomes a prostitute in late 19th-century Florence; in Senilità (1962), based on Italo Svevo’s book, she was so superbly photographed in black and white that she upstaged not only her miscast co-star, Anthony Franciosa, but even the 1920s Trieste setting. Critics began to describe her as an Italian Louise Brooks.
Cardinale had until then been dubbed by other actors, due to her French-accented Sicilian dialect, but Fellini so liked her much-maligned voice that he let her use it in 8½.
That year, she also played her first important role in an English-speaking film, The Pink Panther, for which Blake Edwards had insisted on switching one of the locations to Rome, so that she could play the Indian princess. (Thirty years later, Edwards cast her again, this time as Roberto Benigni’s mother, in the less successful Son of the Pink Panther.)
Cardinale went on to have leading roles in several mostly unmemorable Hollywood films, including Henry Hathaway’s Circus World (1964), with John Wayne, and Richard Brooks’s The Professionals (1966), with Lancaster. Cardinale considered this the best of her Hollywood films, but she always considered herself a European actor, and returned to the continent in the 70s, settling in Paris.
One of four children born in Tunis, to Sicilian immigrants Yolanda (nee Greco) and Franco Cardinale, Claude (as she was christened) spoke more French and Arabic as a child than Italian. She did well at school and her father, who worked as a clerk, wanted her to become a teacher. But as a teenager she won a contest as the most beautiful Italian girl in Tunisia and the prize was a free trip to the Venice film festival in 1957, where she was a target for photographers.
She appeared in two French movies filmed in Tunis, in one of which, Goha (1958), directed by Jacques Baratier, she played an Arab girl opposite Omar Sharif. After Venice, her parents let her go to Rome to study at a drama school. A photograph of her came to the attention of the producer Franco Cristaldi, who was looking for someone to play the sister of one of the band of bungling thieves in Mario Monicelli’s cult comedy I Soliti Ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958).
Cardinale got the part. However, she had also had a secret pregnancy during this time, giving birth to a son, Patrick, and Cristaldi put her under contract, obliging her to say that he was her younger brother. “Film stars don’t have illegitimate children,” he told her. Though she would be grateful to Cristaldi for launching her career, and would marry him in 1966, Cardinale later admitted her resentment at the way he had treated her in those early years. “I felt like a prisoner, an employee on a fixed salary,” she wrote in her autobiography.
After appearing in Pietro Germi’s Un Maledetto Imbroglio (The Facts of Murder, 1959), she was sent to London to play an Italian servant girl in Ralph Thomas’s Upstairs and Downstairs (1959). She then had a starring role alongside Orson Welles in Abel Gance’s Austerlitz (1960), and her career was further boosted the same year when she worked for the first time with Visconti in Rocco e i Suoi Fratelli (Rocco and his Brothers). Visconti, Cardinale later said, “trained me to be beautiful”. In 1965 she appeared for the third time under his direction, in Vaghe Stelle dell’Orsa (Of a Thousand Delights).
After Once Upon a Time in the West, Cristaldi did a deal with the Soviets for a co-production, Krasnaya Palatka (The Red Tent, 1969), directed by Mikhail Kalatozov. In this epic about the Italian airforce general Umberto Nobile (played by Peter Finch), whose 1928 flight to the Arctic in an airship ended in disaster, Cardinale played the fiancee of one of Nobile’s crew.
While they were filming in Moscow, I was asked to escort her on an after-hours visit to the Kremlin Museum, where she was to be photographed with the tsarist treasures and with Sean Connery (who played Roald Amundsen in the film). We arrived at the wrong entrance and had to run through the citadel’s deserted byways to the museum, where we found the Kremlin big shots anxious to meet her.
The Kalatozov film flopped, but Cardinale handled with good humour the squabbles between the Poles, Italians, Americans and Britons making another international co-production, The Adventures of Gerard (1970), Jerzy Skolimowski’s tongue-in-cheek film of Arthur Conan Doyle’s satirical stories.
After working again with Visconti and Lancaster, in Conversation Piece (1974), she appeared in a film about the Neapolitan Camorra called I Guappi (1974), directed by Pasquale Squitieri, with whom she began a private and professional relationship, leading to an acrimonious divorce from Cristaldi.
Cardinale and Squitieri’s union was sometimes darkened by the temperamental Neapolitan’s rightwing views, though she would always defend him. He directed her in many meaty parts, among which the best was undoubtedly the title role of Claretta (1984), about Benito Mussolini’s mistress.
Among her other notable films of this period were Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982), in which she had a small but pivotal role, and Luigi Comencini’s four-hour television adaptation, made in 1986, of Elsa Morante’s bestselling novel La Storia (History).
Forty years after her first appearance at Venice, the film festival awarded her a Golden Lion in 1997, and she received a lifetime achievement award at the Berlin film festival in 2002.
She made her stage debut in Paris in 2000, in the French version of an erotic Italian play, La Venexiana, but continued to make films, telling the Guardian in 2013, when her tally of roles had reached 135 with The Artist and the Model, “I don’t want to stop.” Her final film was the Tunisian-Italian drama The Island of Forgiveness (2022).
Living in France, she worked for Unesco, while Squitieri continued to live in Rome; they separated in the 90s. Their daughter, Claudine, was born in 1979, the year that Cardinale also became a grandmother to Patrick’s daughter, Lucilla.
She is survived by her children.
• Claudia (Claude) Joséphine Rose Cardinale, actor, born 15 April 1938; died 23 September 2025
• This obituary has been updated since John Francis Lane’s death in 2018
