Cinema, Claudia Cardinale told me, was something she never sought. “It came to find me,” she said, her eyes twinkling with that mixture of defiance and charm that had made her one of the greatest screen goddesses of the twentieth century. “I didn’t expect it. Or look for it!”
That sense of destiny of being swept into an art form that would, in turn, be shaped by her ran through our conversation. What was so remarkable about Claudia was that she never spoke of her career in terms of vanity or self-regard, but with gratitude, amusement, and wonder at the strange journeys life had carried her on.
She recalled with particular fondness Federico Fellini, who cast her in 8½. She dismissed the idea that it was her “first major role” with a laugh, describing it instead as a “consecration, since I was really playing myself.” What delighted her was Fellini’s unconventional method. “Federico would come and pick me up and drive me to the set. That’s when we invented the dialogues! It was such an adventure.”
At the same time as she was making 8½, she was also starring in Visconti’s The Leopard, moving from Rome’s modernist chaos to Sicily’s aristocratic splendour on alternate days. “I was going from one set to the other!” she remembered. “Federico was an improviser, while Luchino was so precise. We rehearsed the ball scene for a month. Quite a drastic difference really.” Yet she loved both men equally: “I was studious and light-hearted, and I learned so much from both.”
When I asked her about The Pink Panther, she broke into laughter at the memory of a certain infamous scene: “Haha, absolutely! I was made to passive smoke on the drunk scene,” she said, still incredulous. “I had a good relationship with Peter [Sellers]. I remember the set as a great experience.”
Her memories of the Swinging Sixties had a sparkle about them. She had, after all, known the Beatles and even accompanied them on tour in Spain. “London in those years was thrilling,” she told me, recalling visits to Mary Quant’s boutique with a note of melancholy at the designer’s recent passing.
Her generosity extended always to her colleagues. Jean-Paul Belmondo, she said, was a joy: “We were both very young, and we learned together.” Jean Rochefort, she described as “always a gentleman.” Leone, Visconti, Fellini but she refused to choose between them. “All these directors were worlds of their own,” she said firmly. “As an actor, you appreciate being in different roles, so why choose?”
And despite being seen as a sex symbol, Claudia never cultivated the hauteur or entourage of a diva. Unlike her Les Pétroleuses co-star Brigitte Bardot, she never surrounded herself with bodyguards or extravagance. “I come from a modest background,” she said simply. “I always stayed very close to my origins and my family.”
Looking back on a career that stretched across six decades and included working with giants from John Wayne to Alain Delon, she resisted my invitation to single out favourites. “Every experience and encounter is precious. I have been so lucky to share the scene with all these wonderful humans.”
Even when I pressed her about the Nouvelle Vague, she deflected with grace, saying she was “not the best person to speak about it,” before summing up what made those years so extraordinary: “They were years of common influence and intense dialogue. That’s what made cinema in those years so rich.”
And rich indeed was the cinema she gave us. Claudia Cardinale was a phenomenon: a woman who embodied Visconti’s aristocratic Sicily, Fellini’s dreamlike Italy, Leone’s mythic West, and Blake Edwards’s playful comedies yet never lost sight of her Tunisian roots, her modesty, or her humanity.
As we parted, she left me with words that seem to echo now with even greater poignancy: “Every encounter is precious.”
So was hers.
Amirreza Tayebi
Author of A Very British Revolution
