Late Sixties screen queen Cardinale lived ‘humble’ life in French town, daughter says
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Claudia Cardinale (far right) at the screening of the film Le Guepard during the 63rd Cannes Film Festival in 2010.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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PARIS – Italian actress Claudia Cardinale, who has died aged 87, spent her final years living a “humble” life in a small French town, far from the glamour of her Sixties silver screen heyday, her daughter told AFP on Sept 24.
Cardinale, who appeared in films by some of Italy’s greatest filmmakers as well as Hollywood classics, died on Sept 23 in Nemours, an hour and a half’s drive south of the capital.
The death of the star of Fellini’s Oscar-winning 8½ and the original 1963 The Pink Panther prompted tributes from French President Emmanuel Macron as well as his Italian counterpart Sergio Mattarella.
The star, known for her beauty and husky voice, spent the latter stage of her life with her daughter at a former tannery in Nemours that she converted into an arts centre and Italian restaurant.
“I am very happy to have been able to share these past years with her, in the festive and vibrant life of this place with workshops, artists, guesthouses, a restaurant, friends,” her daughter Claudia Squitieri told AFP in Nemours.
“She lived simply, humble, true to herself,” she continued.
Local well-wishers dropped flowers at Cardinale’s Le Picardeau restaurant on Sept 24, while the Venice and Cannes film festivals both paid tribute to her career spanning 175 films.
“Claudia Cardinale embodied... a gaze, a talent that added so much to the works of the greatest, from Rome to Hollywood, and Paris, which she chose as her homeland,” Italian President Sergio Mattarella wrote on X.
Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Frémaux called her an “adventurer, free and passionate” who “won our hearts from film to film”.
Born in La Goulette, near Tunis, on April 15, 1938, to Sicilian parents, Cardinale began a career in film after winning a beauty contest and travelling to the Venice film festival, where she encountered eager directors and producers.
Cardinale’s fairytale career, however, began as a nightmare.
She fell pregnant after being raped in her teens by a film producer, leaving her to bring up her son Patrick on her own with her earnings from her cinema career.
Although desired by many, she said her “only love” was the blue-eyed Neapolitan director Pasquale Squitieri, father to her daughter Claudia. He died in 2017.
Critics labelled Cardinale the “embodiment of postwar European glamour”, and she was packaged as such, both on screen and off.
After working in Italy she was embraced by Hollywood, where she had a huge hit with Blake Edwards’ The Pink Panther with Peter Sellers, then Henry Hathaway’s Circus World with Rita Hayworth and John Wayne. AFP
