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Agence France-Presse

Sixties screen siren Claudia Cardinale, who died on Tuesday aged 87, entranced audiences across the globe with the sultry gaze that made her the muse of Luchino Visconti and Federico Fellini.
With her fierce beauty and husky voice, Cardinale not only captivated Italy’s greatest filmmakers, she played opposite most of the leading men of the time, from Burt Lancaster to Alain Delon and Henry Fonda.
She died at Nemours near Paris, in the presence of her children, her agent said, adding that the date and place of her burial had not yet been fixed.
“She leaves us the legacy of a free and inspired woman both as a woman and as an artiste,” Laurent Savry said in a message.
Italian Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli called her “one of the greatest Italian actresses of all time” and said Cardinale embodied “Italian grace”.

Cardinale’s fairy-tale career began as a nightmare.
She was raped in her teens by a film producer and became pregnant. With few options open at the time, she made the tough decision to bring up her son Patrick and try “to earn a living and her independence” from cinema, even though she never wanted to be in films.
“I did it for him, for Patrick, the child I wanted to keep despite the circumstances and the enormous scandal,” she told French daily Le Monde in 2017. “I was very young, shy, prudish, almost wild. And without the slightest wish to expose myself on the film sets.”
Born in La Goulette, near Tunis, on 15 April 1938, to Sicilian parents, Cardinale’s life had already been turned upside down at the age of 16 when she was picked out of a crowd to win a beauty contest.
Crowned “The most beautiful Italian woman in Tunis”, the prize was a trip to the Venice film festival where she immediately turned heads and reluctantly, turned her back on her plans to become a teacher.
“All the directors and producers wanted me to make films, and I said, ‘No, I don’t want to!’ she said.
It was her father who eventually convinced her to “give this cinema thing a go”.
As she started to land small film roles, she was raped. A mentor convinced her to secretly give birth in London and entrust the child to her family. Patrick would officially be her younger brother until she revealed the truth seven years later.
“I was forced to accept this lie to avoid a scandal and protect my career,” she said.

From then there was no looking back, as she became swept up into the golden age of Italian cinema, even though she knew “not a word” of the language, speaking only French, Arabic and her parents’ Sicilian dialect.
At 20 “I became the heroine of a fairy tale, the symbol of a country whose language I barely spoke”, she wrote in her 2005 autobiography My Stars.
Her voice had to be dubbed in Italian until she starred in Fellini’s Oscar-winning 8½ in 1963, when the star director insisted she use her own voice.
That year, aged 25, Cardinale filmed both Visconti’s epic period drama The Leopard and Fellini’s surrealist hit 8½ at the same time.
“Visconti wanted me brunette with long hair. Fellini wanted me blonde,” she said.
Critics called her the “embodiment of post-war European glamour”, and she was was packaged as such, both on screen and off.
“It’s almost like she had sexiness thrust upon her,” Britain’s The Guardian wrote in 2013.
Embraced by Hollywood, where she refused to settle, Cardinale had a huge hit with Blake Edwards’ The Pink Panther with Peter Sellers, then Henry Hathaway’s Circus World with Rita Hayworth and John Wayne.
“The best compliment I ever got was from actor David Niven while filming The Pink Panther,” Cardinale recalled.
He said: “Claudia, along with spaghetti, you’re Italy’s greatest invention.”

Refusing to have cosmetic surgery, she went on to perform into her 80s, including in La Strana Coppia, a female version of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple at the Teatro Augusteo in Naples.
Although desired by many, she said her “only love” was the blue-eye Neapolitan director Pasquale Squitieri, father to her daughter Claudia, with whom she worked on a series of films over four decades until his death in 2017.
Her decades-long career has seen her star in 175 films and both the Venice and Berlin festivals awarded her honorary prizes.
In 2017 she featured on the official poster of the Cannes film festival amid an outcry that her thighs had been airbrushed to make them seem thinner.
A staunch defender of women’s rights, she was named Unesco Goodwill Ambassador in 2000 in recognition of her commitment to the cause of women and girls.
“I’ve had a lot of luck. This job has given me a multitude of lives, and the possibility of putting my fame at the service of many causes,” she said.


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Fame and celebrity

Italian actress Claudia Cardinale dies aged 87

Italian actress Claudia Cardinale (right) and Italian film director Federico Fellini appear during an Academy Awards ceremony in Rome on May 27, 1964. Photo: AP Photo

Italian actress Claudia Cardinale smiles during a news conference in Cluj Napoca, Romania, in June 2009. Photo: Reuters

Italian actress Claudia Cardinale is seen in an image from October 1961. Photo: AFP

Italian actress Claudia Cardinale and Italian film director Federico Fellini appear during an Academy Awards ceremony in Rome in May 1964. Photo: AP

Claudia Cardinale appears at the premiere of the film “Sink or Swim” at Cannes in May 2018. Photo: AP

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British actor Terence Stamp at the Marrakesh International Film Festival in Morocco in 2005. Photo: Reuters

Stamp in Los Angeles in December 2008 for the Valkyrie premiere. Photo: Reuters

Stamp at the opening ceremony of the Marrakech International Film Festival in Morocco in 2012. Photo: AFP

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Actor Jerry Adler at the funeral of The Sopranos co-star James Gandolfini in New York in 2013. Adler died on Sunday at the age of 96. Photo: AP

The Sopranos star James Gandolfini at the Emmy Awards in Los Angeles in 2000. Photo: AP

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Loni Anderson in 2015. File photo: Invision via AP

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World

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The actress, who starred next to leading men from Burt Lancaster to Henry Fonda, was the muse of Luchino Visconti and Federico Fellini


The actress, who starred next to leading men from Burt Lancaster to Henry Fonda, was the muse of Luchino Visconti and Federico Fellini.


Italian actress Claudia Cardinale dies aged 87

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The actress, who starred next to leading men from Burt Lancaster to Henry Fonda, was the muse of Luchino Visconti and Federico Fellini

The actress, who starred next to leading men from Burt Lancaster to Henry Fonda, was the muse of Luchino Visconti and Federico Fellini