Claudia Cardinale, legend of Italian cinema, died at 87
The Italian actor acclaimed Claudia Cardinale, who played in some of the most famous European films of the 1960s and 1970s, died on Tuesday AFP. She was 87 years old.
She played in more than 100 films and productions made for television, but she was best known for having embodied juvenile purity in the “8½” of Federico Fellini, in which she played with Marcello Mastroianni in 1963.
Cardinale was also congratulated for her role as Angelica Sedara in the awarded screen adaptation of Luchino Visconti of the historical novel “The Leopard” the same year and a reformed prostitute in the Western spaghetti of Sergio Leone “Once upon a time in the West” in 1968.
She died in Nemours, France, surrounded by her children, said her agent Laurent Savry. Savry and his agency did not immediately return the requests sent by email of comments from the Associated Press.
Cardinale began her film career at the age of 17 after winning a beauty contest in Tunisia, where she was born from Sicilian parents who had emigrated to North Africa. The competition brought her to the Venice Film Festival, where she drew the attention of the Italian film industry.
Before participating in the beauty competition, she expected to become a teacher.
“The fact that I make films is just an accident,” recalls Cardinale by accepting a life production price in Berlin Film Festival in 2002. “When they asked me” do you want to be in the films? “I said no and they insisted for six months.”
Its success occurred following the international celebrity of Sophia Loren and it was presented as Italian’s response to Brigitte Bardot. Although he has never reached the level of success of the French actor, she was nevertheless considered as a star and worked with the main directors of Europe and Hollywood.
“They gave me everything,” said Cardinale. “It’s wonderful to live so many lives. I lived more than 150 lives, completely different women. ”
One of his first roles was as a Sicilian girl dressed in black in the classic of 1958 comedy “Big deal on Madonna Street”. It was produced by Franco Cristaldi, who managed her beginning of a career and to whom she married 1966 to 1975.
The sensual brunette with huge eyes was often thrown like a woman with hot blood. When she had a deep voice and spoke Italian with a heavy French accent, her voice was nicknamed in her first films.
Her career in Hollywood only had partial success because she was not interested in abandoning the European film. Nevertheless, she achieved a certain reputation by teaming up with Rock Hudson in the 1965 comedy thriller “Bounsefold” and another comedy “Do’t Make Waves” with Tony Curtis two years later.
Cardinale herself considered the “The Professionals” of 1966, directed by Richard Brooks as the best of her Hollywood films, where she played alongside Burt Lancaster, Jack Palance, Robert Ryan and Lee Marvin.
In a 2002 interview with The Guardian, she explained that the Hollywood studio “wanted me to sign an exclusivity contract, and I refused. Because I am a European actress and I went there for films.”
“And I had a great opportunity with Richard Brooks,” The Professionals “, which is really a magnificent film,” she said. “For me,” professionals “are the best I did in Hollywood.”
Among her industry awards, there was a golden lion for success for life she received at the Venice Film Festival almost 40 years after her initial appearance on the screen.
In 2000, Cardinale was appointed goodwill ambassador for the United Nations educational, scientific and cultural organization for the defense of women’s rights.
She had two children. One with Cristaldi and a second with his last companion, the Italian director Pasquale Squitierri.
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Simpson, the main editor of this NECRology, retired from the Associated Press in 2013.
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