The most beautiful Italian invention after spaghetti or the most beautiful Italian in Tunisia – the woman with the brilliant name has already been showered with countless compliments. Claudia Cardinale, born in the Maghreb and now at home in France, has always felt Italian – as a southern Italian, mind you.
The Mediterranean country also likes to adorn itself with the “irresistible” movie star who, after an exciting film career, has become an activist for women’s rights. This Saturday (April 15) Claudia Cardinale will be 85 years old.
Aging with dignity
“La Cardinale”, as she is often just called in Italy, can look back on an intoxicating career and an eventful life. Unlike many of her colleagues, she refuses to go the way of the reluctantly aging divas: she managed to age with dignity and proudly displays her unmistakable face in all its naturalness with wrinkles and traces of life. To this day, many still regard her as an icon and legend of Italian and French film, by which other actresses have long had to be measured.
The Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and the Golden Bear at the Berlinale testify to her acting work. In old age, apart from a few productions, Cardinale has become quiet. Quite unusually, you no longer see her there as a vamp and sex symbol, but either as a matriarch or grandmother. She most recently played supporting roles in the Netflix production “Rogue City” (2020) and the challenging drama “The Island of Forgiveness” (2022), which deals with the life of a Tunisian of Italian descent.
Cardinale has a strong connection with Tunisia. She was born in Tunis in 1938 as the daughter of Sicilian emigrants and grew up trilingual – French, Arabic and Sicilian. The film diva once described her childhood in the North African country as a “golden age” full of “magical moments”. In her old homeland, people are proud: La Goulette, a suburb of Tunis where Cardinale was born, solemnly named a street after her in 2022 – she was there personally at the time.
First successes at the beginning of the 1960s
Cardinale has been a success in the productions of highly respected Italian film luminaries and has achieved international fame with her roles. In Federico Fellini’s film drama “8 1/2” from 1963, she appears as a muse dressed in white and prancing between trees and landed one of her first successes alongside Marcello Mastroianni. The Italian became world famous with Luchino Visconti’s “The Leopard” (1963) alongside Alain Delon and Burt Lancaster and as Princess Dala in the crime comedy “The Pink Panther” (1963). Thanks in particular to Sergio Leone’s Italo-Western “Play me the Song of Death” (1968), she secured her place in the triumvirate of Italian film divas of the 1960s and 70s.
Cardinale’s name is mentioned in the same breath as two other icons of Italian cinema, Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida. Lollobrigida died in January. “I’m very saddened by the death of Gina. She was a woman who was so full of energy and interests that it didn’t seem like she could go away,” Cardinale said in an interview just days after her former colleague’s death of the “Corriere della Sera”.
freedom and independence
She always valued freedom and independence, both privately and professionally. The old days were different – as a young, pretty woman, she had to fight hard for it. That’s why she’s often called “The Untameable”. A book about her life that her daughter Claudia Squitieri recently published has the same name. “Claudia’s untameability is a common thread that runs through her entire life. It is reflected in the decisions of her life as well as in her roles,” writes the daughter, with whom Cardinale lives in Fontainebleau, France, in the book’s foreword. Her longtime partner Pasquale Squitieri called her “Southern Wind” because of her temperament, according to her daughter.
The men got to feel the irrepressible character. She gave a few screen Casanovas who made advances to her the cold shoulder. From Marlon Brando to Alain Delon, many tried, but she turned them all down, says Cardinale herself. Self-determination and standing up for women’s rights were always important to her.
But professionally she could not be independent and self-determined for a long time. As a young and inexperienced woman, her manager at the time bound her to hard and sometimes humiliating contracts; she was not allowed to marry or change her weight too much, for example. This is precisely why she is now more combative than ever for equality between men and women.
commitment to women
Unlike some of her colleagues from back then, Cardinale supports movements like
“CC” has become quieter and quieter on the screen, but now more than ever she shines as a fighter for women’s rights. In an interview, she recently gave young people advice: “These are uncertain times for all of us. I only give young people, especially girls, one piece of advice: protect your dignity. Always, at all times, under all circumstances.”
