The antidiva of auteur cinema

The capricious and overbearing Angelica in The Leopard alongside Alain Delon; Claudia whom Mastroianni interrogates in the black and white of Fellini's 8½ and answers existential questions with her hoarse, silvery voice (the two directors, Visconti and Fellini, fought over her on the same set in 1962); the tough Jill McBain in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, alongside Henry Fonda, Jason Robards and Charles Bronson. But also the playful accomplice of Petere Sellers and David Niven in Blake Edward's The Pink Panther, the Molly in Herzog's Fitzcarraldo next to the bewildered Klaus Kinski, the pitiful and sorrowful Mary Magdalene in Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth.

How much life Claudia Cardinale gave us, who died at the age of 87 in France where she had been living for years, leaving her 'most beautiful face in the world', as she had been dubbed by the press, covered in wrinkles and veils. Such conspicuous beauty and preponderant charm had probably weighed on a character that was rather shy and averse to stardom. So, when the years had passed, she had not wanted to surgically preserve that prodigy that had granted her the limelight and lent herself to the cameras without veils.

"She is beautiful, young and old, a child and already a woman, authentic, sunny," Guido-Mastroianni tells her in words that were certainly written for her by Fellini, Flaiano, Pinelli and Rondi, authors of the screenplay for 8 e ½. Claudia Cardinale marked a caesura in our cinema by coming after the majoratas, Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, offering the camera a sinuous but not abundant figure that lends itself to authorship.

Born in Tunis in 1938, she had Sicilian roots and this was her first approach to the Italian language, which she had to learn for the cinema. The one she learned at school was French. Cardinale's first approach to cinema was her participation, together with her schoolmates, in a 1956 short film by René Vautier, Les Anneaux d'or, on the theme of the country's economic and social independence, which won the Silver Bear in Berlin. From there the leap to The Days of Love by Jacques Baratier with Omar Sharif.

But, instead of making her blossom, that period marked the beginning of a turbulent period for the actress in the making, especially from a personal point of view, also because she was the victim of violence from an older man whose name she did not reveal. She fell into depression and was saved by Franco Cristaldi, the International President of Producers and founder of Vides cinematografica, who offered her a strict contract, to make her one of Cinecittà's leading actresses.