Early Life and Childhood
Claudia Cardinale was born Claude Joséphine Rose Cardinale on April 15, 1938, in La Goulette (a neighborhood of Tunis), the capital of the French protectorate of Tunisia. Her father, Francesco Cardinale, was a construction worker originally from Sicily and her mother, Yolande Greco, was born illiterate in Tunisia to the family of a fishing boat captain.
Growing up, Claudia’s home language was French and she also learned to speak her Sicilian parent’s dialect. She studied at the Saint-Joseph-of-the-Apparition school in Carthage and then to Paul Cambon School with aspirations of being a schoolteacher. As a teen-ager, quiet but feisty, she was smitten with Brigitte Bardot.
Career Beginnings and Rise to Fame
He began his film career entering a beauty contest, ‘the most beautiful Italian girl in Tunisia’ in 1957 and after that his prize was going to Italy and be contracted for some films. She had an uncredited role in the 1958 film Goha with Omar Sharif.
She achieved worldwide fame with such movies as Rocco and His Brothers (1960), Girl with a Suitcase (1961) and Cartouche (1962) becoming a well-known sex symbol of the 1950s and 1960s, due to her whole filmography from which she was signed. At its height, in 1963, she was an international star for roles in Federico Fellini’s “8½,” Luchino Visconti’s “The Leopard” and Blake Edwards’ “The Pink Panther.”
International Success
Cardinale became one of the most popular Italian actresses and a major international star with roles in The Magnificent Showman (1965), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), and Circus World (1964).
Her beauty and talent, that distinctive presence, also made her one of the most celebrated actresses of the 1960s and ’70s, accumulating a raft of honors over her career including three David di Donatello Awards (Italy’s Oscars) as well as a lifetime achievement Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1993.
Personal Life
Claudia Cardinale had a terrible personal life. When she was 19, she had a son, Patrick; the father of the child was not publicly disclosed; he eventually would be adopted by the film producer Franco Cristaldi, who became her mentor and lifelong companion until his death even though they never married.
She later lived with film director Pasquale Squitieri for 42 years, until his death in 2017, and had a daughter with him. Cardinale was a polyglot (she spoke French, Italian, English and Spanish besides her native Sicilian) and an advocate for womens rights as well as other liberal policy was clearly no wallflower. She was a goodwill ambassador for UNESCO in the defense of women’s rights.
Later Years and Death
Claudia Cardinale continued to work into old age and remains one of the world’s cinema icons. She passed away, surrounded by her family at home in Nemours, France on 23 September 2025 aged 87 of natural causes. The film world in addition to a broad array of other people felt her death and celebrated her life recognizing what she had done for Italian and European cinema but also how significant a cultural icon she was.
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