Claudia Cardinale, who died this week aged 89, was one of few Italian actresses to achieve global stardom along with Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren.
Whereas Lollobrigida and Loren embodied the beauty of Italy, Cardinale – I always feel – embodied the beauty of the Mediterranean. Her face and physique were the irresistible but perilous fruit of its people and cultures. The Italians call it: ‘Me-di-terr-aneo.’
Many years ago, when I was involved with a woman from the Italian deep south, someone told me: ‘If you want to marry such a woman, you must not travel by plane to seek the consent of her father, nor by train or car, you must go on foot, and with a stone in your shoe, because only then will you understand what you are letting yourself in for.’
Cardinale was a woman of the deep, deep south. My friend Gianfranco Angelucci, the great chronicler of director Federico Fellini who worked with her, tells me: ‘She had magnolia skin, an enchanting smile, velvet eyes, bewitching breasts, and a sinuous body softer than a krapfen alla crema. And the voice, my God! When at last they stopped dubbing it – throaty, murky, grainy – like a litany of sins. And in no way merely venial ones.’
She and Loren, both younger than Lollobrigida, were at their most famous during the golden era of Italian cinema in the 1960s when Italian directors such as Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Bernardo Bertolucci amazed the world.
Whereas Sophia Loren embodied the beauty of Italy, Cardinale embodied the beauty of the Mediterranean
Born in Tunisia, then a French protectorate, to Sicilian emigrés, Cardinale began her acting career after winning a beauty contest in 1957 when she was 19. She had not entered the competition, organised by the Italian film industry, but was spotted in the crowd and pushed up on stage.
Perhaps it is because I am old and out of touch but I cannot think of a single actress, or model for that matter, in recent decades who comes close to the beauty of Cardinale. I asked Caterina, my eldest daughter, to give me a name of someone who might fit the bill. ‘Everyone talks about Sydney Sweeney,’ she said. I took a quick look online. Really?
The great Fellini put it like this: Cardinale had the face of ‘a child who is already a woman’, but which was ‘passionately lost in tragedy’.
Regardless of whether it was chance, destiny or divine intervention that caused her to win that beauty competition, the prize was an invitation to the Venice Film Festival. There, her devastating looks led to the offer of a place at the Rome Cinema School. But after just three months she abandoned the course – it is not clear why – and returned to Tunisia where she was raped by a Frenchman, which she would reveal in a 1967 television interview.
She became pregnant but refused to abort the child. Even though abortion was illegal, this was an extraordinary thing to do, not only because the child was the product of a rape, but also because of the social stigma attached to unmarried mothers, above all in Sicilian families. She never sought to prosecute or name the rapist.
In 2017, she told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera: ‘A man whom I did not know, much older than me, forced me to get into his car and he raped me. When that man found out about my pregnancy he got in touch and said I should abort. Not even for a moment did I think about getting rid of the little creature. I spoke with my marvellous parents and my sister Blanche and we decided that my child would be brought up in our family as a younger brother.’
Italian film producer Franco Cristaldi had meanwhile offered her a part in I Soliti Ignoti (Big Deal On Madonna Street in English), which launched her career. During filming, she concealed her pregnancy until no longer possible. But Cristaldi insisted she keep it secret to protect her career and, in October 1958, flew her to London where she gave birth to a son whom she named Patrick after the church where he was baptised. Cristaldi, who would marry her and adopt Patrick, destroyed letters behind her back from the boy’s rapist father who now wanted to recognise his son. When Patrick was an adult he decided not to contact his real father.
In 2017, Cardinale told Le Monde: ‘I would never have made it if the birth of my little boy, as a result of a rape, had not driven me to get involved in the cinema to create a life for myself and be independent. It’s for him that I did it.’
Cardinale sought liberty as a woman in a society that did not grant it. But her marriage to Cristaldi turned out to be yet another prison.
Ironically, although she was a classic champagne socialist, she found liberty and thus happiness in the early 1970s with her second husband, film director Pasquale Squitieri: a renowned lothario, neo-fascist and later Italian senator. He provoked in her, she said, madness and energy. They had a child together, Claudia.
It was Fellini who insisted she use her real voice for the first time in his 1963 Oscar-winning masterpiece 8½, about a film director unable to create a film in which she is cast as the director’s ideal woman. Previously, directors had felt her husky voice combined with her French accent would put off the public.
Cardinale’s most famous role was as the female protagonist in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West (1968) with Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson – the spaghetti western to end all spaghetti westerns – often cited as one of the best westerns ever made.
Her last big role was in Werner Herzog’s cult movie Fitzcarraldo (1982) as the wealthy owner of a brothel in Peru, alongside the dangerously unhinged Klaus Kinski as a penniless Irishman whose dream is to build an opera house in the Amazon jungle. This involves, among other things, hundreds of indigenous people hauling a steam boat over a mountain. Filming was not easy and the conditions atrocious. At one point a native chief told Herzog, hardly normal himself, they wanted to kill Kinski because of his awful behaviour. Herzog told them not to but only because he needed Kinski alive to finish the film. Cardinale said it was ‘like a survival battle to live… in a location out of this world’.
But it is for Luchino Visconti’s Il Gatopardo (1963) – wrongly translated in English as The Leopard – that I shall never forget Claudia Cardinale. Her Sicilian blood made her perfect for this part.
The film is based on the magnificent novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa about his ancestors, a meditation on death – the death of the Sicilian aristocracy – and of its protagonist, the Prince of Salina (played weirdly but brilliantly by Burt Lancaster) after the 1860 invasion of the island by Giuseppe Garibaldi which began the re-unification of Italy. But it is also about the overwhelming – transformational – power of female beauty.
The key moment comes when the prince’s beloved nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) first sets eyes on Angelica (Cardinale), the daughter of the mayor, Calogero Sedàra. Born poor, Sedàra has become rich by dodgy land deals at the very margins of legality. His daughter must now marry into the impoverished but princely Salina family to help both sides. Fortunately, she and Tancredi are instantly infatuated.
Tomasi writes of the arrival of Angelica for dinner that first night at the Salina palazzo: ‘The Salina family all stood there with breath taken away… She was tall and well-made, on an ample scale; her skin looked as if it had the flavour of fresh cream which it resembled, her childlike mouth that of strawberries. Under a mass of raven hair, curling in gentle waves, her green eyes gleamed motionless as those of statues, and like them a little cruel. She was moving slowly, making her wide white skirt rotate around her, and emanating from her whole person the invincible calm of a woman sure of her own beauty. Only many months later was it known that at the moment of that victorious entry of hers she had been on the point of fainting from nerves.’
One feels that the sensual beauty of Sedàra’s daughter, Angelica, would have been quite enough on its own to overcome any opposition. Claudia Cardinale possessed such beauty. As Virgil wrote of Venus in the Aeneid: Vera incessu patuit dea.
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