She was 87 years old. She was surrounded by her children at her country house in Nemours, an old tannery located about 80 km south of Paris where she had chosen to live after leaving her Parisian apartment in Le Marais.
On the vast grounds of her residence, she had opened a restaurant and the headquarters of the Claudia Cardinale Foundation that supports contemporary artists in the audiovisual field. Her daughter Claudia (46), from her relationship with director Pasquale Squitieri, who had three children from a previous relationship, Vittoria, Paola, and Mario.
Before reaching stardom, Claudia Cardinale suffered a rape at 16 in Tunisia, the country where she was born in 1938 into a Sicilian family, as recalled by Il Corriere della Sera. As the actress recounted in Il Corriere, "a man I didn't know, much older than me, forced me into a car and raped me." That marked her for life, but with the help of her parents and her sister Blanche, she managed to move forward to avoid having an abortion.
As a result of that abhorrent act, one of the great men in her life, Patrick, was born in London, whom they passed off as the actress's younger brother for years for image reasons. In those early years, Cardinale had the protection of her first great love, the powerful producer Franco Cristaldi, who took care of destroying the letters that the rapist sent in an attempt to acknowledge his offspring.
fallen in love with a married man. A major scandal in Italy. Eventually, the couple married in 1966, but divorced in 1975. Thanks to him, she found the strength to firmly enter the film industry after winning the beauty contest La italiana más bella in Tunisia, which earned her a trip to the Venice Film Festival in 1957. By then, she had already appeared in a short film titled Les Anneaux d'or with her classmates.
Her film debut was with the Franco-Tunisian movie Goha, the Simple (1958), alongside the Egyptian star and heartthrob Omar Sharif. In Italy, her first film was Rufufú (1958), directed by Mario Monicelli and alongside two other heartthrobs, Vittorio Gassman and Marcello Mastroianni, who would later confess to her in front of his partner, the icy Catherine Deneuve, that he had once fallen head over heels for her. Cardinale ignored him, and as punishment, Deneuve stopped speaking to the Italian diva.
Claudia loved to take off her glasses and blow smoke directly at journalists. Especially at cameras. Witness to this fact is the one writing these lines in San Sebastian, Seville, and La Vall d'en Bas (Girona). It was something that she found extremely amusing. In close quarters, she was always fun and affectionate.
In 1963, she starred in The Pink Panther, where she displayed all her glamour. Her co-star, David Niven, described her as "the most beautiful Italian invention after spaghetti."
Raised in French, Tunisian Arabic, and Sicilian, in order to make her way internationally, she was forced to learn Italian and English. Living in Hollywood for three years, Claudia refused to have a night with Marlon Brando when he showed up at the door of her hotel room claiming that as both were Aries, they had to prove their passion between the sheets. Over time, the actress would regret rejecting him.
Against all odds, Cardinale opened up when she confessed to journalist Enzo Biagi that her brother was actually her son. The child was seven years old. "It was necessary. Courage comes when needed," she confessed to Oggi and L'Europeo. Several years later, mother and son posed for the cover of ¡Hola!
In the late 70s, Claudia became a grandmother to a girl named Lucilla thanks to her son Patrick, who worked as a jewelry designer and owned a restaurant in New York. In 1979, the actress became a mother for the second time to her daughter Claudia. Her father was director Pasquale Squitieri, whom she had fallen in love with and had been with for a little over two decades. Through her daughter, she has a grandson named Milo.
In the past, it was said that she was one of the mistresses of Jacques Chirac - President of the French Republic from 1995 to 2007 - and two years ago, rumors spread that she was living sick in a nursing home. That bothered her quite a bit. In reality, she was living with her children.
The last public photo that appeared on her Instagram profile is from June 16, 2024, at an event in her honor at the Ciné du Paradis in Fontainebleau, a town near her last residence. Her last work was the short film Un Cardinale Donna, a poetic portrait made by her daughter and presented two years ago at the MoMA in New York during the Cinecittà retrospective.