Addio, Angelica

After Alain Delon and Robert Redford, it is Claudia Cardinale’s turn to leave the stage. The beautiful Italian actress passed away on the evening of September 24th, at the honourable age of 87. Of this legendary generation of cinema stars, only a handful remain. Clint Eastwood and Brigitte Bardot are still going strong. But for how much longer?

Her glowing eyes, rimmed with black, are now closed forever, and with her, a little more of that blessed era disappears—a time when women burned with passionate femininity and men knew how to make hearts flutter.

Claudia, whose birth name was Claude, was born in Tunis April 15th, 1938, during the French protectorate. Her grandparents were Sicilian, and it was they who passed on her Italian blood and Mediterranean beauty, which attracted attention from an early age. At home, she spoke French and a little Sicilian dialect but did not master Italian.

She began her career with brief appearances on screen, in a short film in 1956, then a brief role alongside Omar Sharif in 1958.

Her youth was marked by a terrible tragedy. She was only eighteen when she fell under the spell of a Frenchman ten years her senior. She found herself trapped in an unhealthy relationship with a man who harassed and raped her. 

The future had seemed bright for her. She had just been named the “Most Beautiful Italian Woman in Tunisia,” a title that opened the doors to the Venice Film Festival for her. On the beaches of the lagoon, her freshness and beauty were acclaimed with enamoured cries of “Claudia!”—a name she kept. But back in Tunis after this enchanted interlude, the young woman discovered she was pregnant. Being an unwed mother at the time was anything but an enviable position. But the life growing inside her was stronger than anything else, and Cardinale was not a woman to let herself be guided by others, even in the face of adversity. The child’s father pressured her to have an abortion, but she refused and chose to keep the baby.

It was while she was pregnant that she signed her first film contract with Franco Cristaldi, an Italian producer who would become her partner for several years and then her husband. She tried to hide her pregnancy but confided in him. He supported her: Cristaldi understood that he could not under any circumstances let go of those beautiful, bewitching black eyes.

In 1958, she starred for the first time in an Italian film, I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street), produced by Cristaldi, alongside Vittorio Gassmann and Marcello Mastroianni. Ironically, for someone who would come to embody the quintessential Italian woman, she spoke almost no Italian at the time and watched with wide eyes as all these people ran around the set, gesticulating wildly and shouting loudly.

With Cristaldi’s help, Cardinale gave birth in secret in London. She then presented her child, a little boy whom she named Patrick, after her little brother.

In Big Deal on Madonna Street, she stole the show. Following her brief but remarkable performance, she was offered a multitude of small roles. A year later, in 1959, in Un maledetto imbroglio (The Facts of Murder), she finally, or already, found herself in the lead role. Her performance captivated two masters of cinema, and not the least: Fellini and Pasolini.

That same year, the beautiful Claudia settled in France, her other homeland. She was chosen by Abel Gance to play Pauline Bonaparte in his blockbuster Austerlitz, dedicated to Napoleon, which reunited the filmmaker with the glory days of the Napoleonic epic, first brought to the screen by him in 1927. The role was relatively insignificant, but the signature was prestigious. Claudia Cardinale then shone in a film somewhat forgotten today outside of cinephile circles, Les Lions sont lâchés (The Lions Are Loose), directed by the brilliant duo of Henri Verneuil and Michel Audiard. The film features Danielle Darrieux, Michèle Morgan and Claudia Cardinale–MM, DD and CC, three generations of femmes fatales embodying irresistible French elegance.

In the minds of the French public, ‘CC’ became the alter ego of ‘BB’, Brigitte Bardot, who was enjoying huge success at the same time. The early 1960s were a difficult period for the actress, who took on one role after another—up to five films a year—at a time when she also had to devote her attention to her young son.

In 1961, in Valerio Zurlini’s La Ragazza con la Valigia (The Girl with the Suitcase), she played the poignant role of Aida, a single mother who sings and dances to earn enough money to raise her child. Her character’s story was like a painful echo of her own story, which at the time was still unknown to everyone. She recounted this terrible memory in an interview with the newspaper Libération in 2005: “The most difficult scene to shoot was my confession in the station restaurant, when I talk about the secret child I had, as an unwed mother, and left in Rimini. Because that was exactly my situation in life, but I couldn’t tell anyone. In my acting contract, it was written that I had to hide the existence of my son, Patrick, and say that he was my little brother. In this scene, I had to talk about it, the situation was the same and I was crying all the time. People didn’t understand why this scene upset me so much. I put all my secret into it.”

Cardinale already had a career marked by beautiful moments in cinema. But 1963 marked her true consecration, allowing her to star in two masterpieces, directed by two giants: Luchino Visconti’s Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) and Federico Fellini’s Otto e Mezzo (Eight and a Half).

In The Leopard, the couple formed by Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon, Angelica and Tancredi, set the screen alight. Visconti made wonderful use of the incandescent passion that emanated from the fresh young girl. She seduces the heart of the handsome aristocrat in decline who desperately needs her money … and her dazzling beauty, which will enable him to regenerate the tired blood of the Leopards. The waltz scene, where she dances with Burt Lancaster to a tune inspired by Verdi and magnified by Nino Rota, is one of the most powerful scenes in the history of cinema. One would expect to see two young leads whirling around the dance floor, but it is in the arms of the sublime, ageing Prince Salina that Angelica gives her all, under the affectionate yet envious gaze of her young fiancé, played by Delon. He watches his beloved whirl around in the arms of his elderly uncle, who dances like a god, torn between the pride of being able to call himself the ultimate possessor of such a jewel and the pang of feeling incapable of such presence and majesty.

After her Italian glory, Cardinale succumbed to the charms of Hollywood. In 1964, she starred opposite John Wayne and Rita Hayworth in The Greatest Show on Earth. In private, the great Hayworth revealed to Cardinale in a succinct phrase the terrible secret of her life sacrificed on the altar of cinema, bursting into tears with these words: “I once too was beautiful…” Cardinale continued her American experiences, but without ever allowing herself to be completely caught in the nets of a soulless film industry that had become a master in the art of breaking women.

French, Italian, American films, Cardinale was everywhere and with everyone. Westerns, comedies, more mature and dramatic roles, she tried everything. Her name was a guarantee of success and audiences were—almost—always there. In total, she made more than 150 films. Not all of them were masterpieces, far from it. But an icon like her could do almost anything she wanted. With boundless energy, she took to the stage at the turn of the 2000s and tried her hand at television films. In 2010, she attracted everyone’s attention at Cannes by appearing on the arm of Alain Delon, her lifelong friend. Age had taken its toll, but her joie de vivre was intact, and above all, that bewildering naturalness that was her power of attraction. Unlike so many of her competitors, Cardinale allowed herself the luxury of never resorting to cosmetic surgery. She knew that wrinkles are the true marks of life—of suffering as well as smiles.

On the set of The Pink Panther, the very British David Niven, with his irresistible humour, summed up Cardinale’s charm in a delightful phrase: “the most beautiful Italian invention since spaghetti.”

However, it was in the Paris region that Cardinale passed away. She had taken up residence in Paris a long time ago, in the late 1980s, before retiring to a house in Nemours, and it was there that she passed away, surrounded by her son and daughter. She will be remembered as the most Italian of Parisians, or the most Parisian of Italians.