Claudia Cardinale, star of film classics "8 1/2", "The Pink Panther", and "Once Upon a Time in the West", dies at 87

Entertainment Weekly

Claudia Cardinale, the actress who graced the screen in more than one of the most celebrated movies in cinema history, including director Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 and Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West in the 1960s, died Tuesday near Paris, her agent, Laurent Savry, told the Agence France-Presse. She was 87.

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Born in Tunisia, where her first language was French, Cardinale had never aspired to be an actress. "If the birth of my little boy, following a rape, hadn't pushed me to get involved in cinema to earn a living and be independent. It was for him that I did it. For Patrick, this baby that I wanted to keep despite the circumstances and the enormous scandal that an out-of-wedlock birth could cause at the time," Cardinale said in a May 2017 interview with French newspaper Le Monde. "I was very young, fierce, modest, almost wild. And without the slightest desire to exhibit myself on film sets."

She recounted that, when she was 17, she was selected as "The Most Beautiful Italian in Tunis," even though she said she hadn't entered the competition.

"The reward was a trip to the Venice Film Festival, where I went with my mother and where my bikini, on the Lido beach, attracted the attention of the directors, whom I immediately rejected," she recalled. "A newspaper even profiled me with the headline 'The girl who doesn't want to make films.' But the requests multiplied. My father started receiving loads of telegrams and finally said, 'Why not?' In the meantime, the tragedy that had occurred and the impending arrival of a baby — which I was keeping secret — convinced me to go for it."

By the late 1950s, she was booking parts in films, although her husky voice was often dubbed early on. Cardinale made several notable films in the '60s, including not only 8 1/2 and Once Upon a Time in the West, but also the Peter Sellers comedy The Pink Panther and the 1963 period drama The Leopard, which was directed by Luchino Visconti.

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