Claudia Cardinale (1938-2025), the disappearance of an icon

The Italian and French actress died at the age of 87, after having dazzled the European cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Tribute.

Only a few days after the disappearance of Robert Redford, another icon of the big screen of the 1960s and 1970s went out. Claudia Cardinale died at the age of 87.

His agent, Laurent Savry, announced his death in Nemours, near Paris (in Seine-et-Marne), stressing that she left “The heritage of a free and inspired woman, as a woman as as an artist”.

Born in Tunis in 1938 in an Italian family, Polyglot – She spoke French, Sicilian as well as Tunisian – Claudia Cardinale had started her career at 20. In a flash, she imposed herself as one of the absolute stars of her generation, chaining filming with the greatest masters of the time.

She explodes first at Luchino Visconti, who offers her significant roles in Rocco and his brothersIn SandraIn Violence and passion and of course in The cheetah. Impossible to forget its shine alongside Alain Delon and Burt Lancaster, where his sensuality competed with the tragic magnitude of the film.

At Federico Fellini, in Eight and a half, It literally becomes a muse, appearance that is both seductive and unreal in front of Marcello Mastroianni, the very embodiment of cinema as a waking dream. In the Popular Adventure Register, she bursts the screen with Jean-Paul Belmondo in Cartridge (1963), overflowing with charm and energy.

Hollywood immediately notes it: Blake Edwards gives him the role of Princess Dahla in The pink pantherfacing David Niven and Peter Sellers. She will also return to the saga in 1993, alongside Roberto Benigni, in The son of the pink panther.

But it is perhaps Sergio Leone who offers him his most unforgettable role: that of Jill McBain, the prostitute who has become wife and mother, confronted with the massacre of her family in Once upon a time in the west. Tragic figure, heroine of western and incarnation of an era, Claudia Cardinale accesses the pantheon of immortal images.

Magnificent brunette full of sensuality and plume, she walked her elegant figure and her raw game in a host of international works signed Valerio Zurlini (The girl at the suitcase), Abel Gance (Austerlitz), Christian-Jaque (Oil), Richard Brooks (Professionals), Marco Ferreri (The hearing), Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo), or Henri Verneuil (Mayrig), to name a few.

If her career slowed down from the 1980s, she continued to appear regularly, until Effie Gray (2014), written by Emma Thompson, alongside Dakota Fanning. His latest striking role.

Celebrated worldwide, she received a golden bear in Berlin in 2002, a golden lion for her entire career in Venice in 1993 and a special David in Italy in 1997.

From Tunis to Cinecittà, from Rome to Hollywood, Claudia Cardinale will have been much more than a star: an icon of elegance and freedom, whose burning gaze will remain forever engraved in the memory of cinema.