Claudia Cardinale: Indomitable On and Off Screen

"When I arrived in Hollywood they wanted to change everything about me: my weight, my look, even my teeth. For a while I was intimidated, but eventually I replied, ‘If I am so ugly, why did you call me here?’” This, followed by her trademark throaty laughter, is what Claudia Cardinale told me when I interviewed her in the Eighties, and it represents her personality in a nutshell: defiant, brave, dignified.

In 2022, Cinecittà dedicated a book to her, curated by her daughter Claudia Squitieri, titled "The Indomitable," and indeed, Cardinale was indomitable. Born in Tunisia to Southern Italian parents, she was raped at 20 and bore a son, Patrick. She had to hide him at the insistence of her producer companion, Franco Cristaldi, whom she always called by his last name because he was older and extremely powerful in the Italian film industry. But eventually she reclaimed her independence from him and fell in love with director Pasquale Squitieri, the father of her daughter Claudia.

Federico Fellini gave her a piece of advice that she never forgot: “When your mouth smiles, your eyes should be serious, and vice versa.” It was a great acting tip, but it also mirrored her complex nature. Her pout, reminiscent of Brigitte Bardot’s — the diva Claudia most wanted to look like as a young actress — expressed her melancholia; her full laughter, with that husky timbre, communicated her joie de vivre and her irony.

She worked with Fellini and with Visconti, whose rivalry was legendary, shooting their masterpieces 8½ and The Leopard at the same time, jumping from set to set. She worked with great Italian directors such as Sergio Leone, Mario Monicelli, Pietro Germi, Marco Ferreri, Liliana Cavani, Franco Zeffirelli and Marco Bellocchio, and with many international auteurs, including Abel Gance, Jerzy Skolimowski, Blake Edwards, Claude Lelouch and Manoel de Oliveira. Everybody wanted her, but nobody ever pinned her down. She was indomitable as an actress and as a woman, and the world is not likely to forget her.