Claudia Cardinale

For the first years of her career, audiences did not hear Claudia Cardinale’s voice. It was low and hoarse and did not match the face, so the producers had her dubbed. Fellini kept it. In 8½ (1963) she is the girl in white who appears with a glass of water whenever Guido runs out of ideas, and Guido knows before we do that a grown man should not want such a thing. Cardinale plays it serene and faintly amused, and out of the dream comes a rasp. The fantasy has a body and the body has been up late.

She had arrived by the usual route: a beauty contest in 1957, a trip to Venice, a contract, small parts, then Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) and Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960). The year that made her was 1963, when she shot The Leopard for Visconti and 8½ for Fellini at the same time, one working with theatrical precision and the other without a script, and The Pink Panther on top. Hollywood followed in the mid-1960s, with The Professionals among others, and mostly did not know what to do with her beyond photographing her; Princess Dala in The Pink Panther is there to be admired and for no other purpose. She kept her European work going, which was wise.

Then Leone. Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) has one woman in it who matters, and she is the whole of its future. Jill steps off a train into a town that does not yet exist, and for 166 minutes Fonda, Bronson and Robards circle her, each certain he is the story. Cardinale gives Jill a practical, unhurried toughness: she has plainly seen worse than any of these men and does not bother to say so. We went in for the faces and for Morricone and came out having watched her most of all, because she is the only person on screen with a plan that lasts past the next gunfight.

The later work was less kind to her. Her contract with the producer Franco Cristaldi ended around 1975, and much of what followed was with the director Pasquale Squitieri, in films that have not travelled far. Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982) is the exception. She is not the reason to see it, Kinski and the river are, but she is the one person in it behaving sensibly, on a shoot that was famously difficult, and Herzog noticed. She kept working into her eighties, with a last film, The Island of Forgiveness, in 2022, and died in 2025 at 87.

Start with Leone, then Fellini, then The Leopard on the largest screen you own, for the ballroom. The Hollywood films are for the curious who want to see what a studio does with an actress it does not understand, which is mostly light her well and ask her to stand still.