L'Italo-Americano

www.italoamericano.org 8 THURSDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2025 L'Italo-Americano To many of our readers in the United States, the route i n t o h e r w o r k p r o b a b l y sounds familiar: The Pink Panther and Once Upon a Time in the West sit on many lists and are easy to find. From there, it is a short step t o 8 ½ a n d T h e L e o p a r d , films that show her versatili- ty, which allowed her to work with various directors in vari- ous creative keys. The movies are different, but Cardinale helps both locate a human center without softening their ambitions. It is also worth saying that Cardinale belonged to a gen- eration that normalized the presence of Italian and Euro- pean performers in American distribution without asking them to become American stars. She could headline a Leone western, appear in an Edwards comedy, then return t o p r o j e c t s i n I t a l y a n d France that asked for some- thing different. That pattern i s c o m m o n t o d a y ; i n t h e 1960s, it required a degree of autonomy and a good sense of timing. It kept her from being typecast and helped the films travel in both direc- tions. authority of the roles. Very importantly, this shift mir- rors the larger changes in E u r o p e a n c i n e m a d u r i n g those years, when women on screen gained more agency and the films around them asked more of their audience. Cardinale starred in over 100 productions throughout her career: it would be almost impossible to list them all. Yet, her awards can tell us more about the magnitude of her work and how the indus- try saw her. Venice gave Car- dinale its Career Golden Lion in 1993; Berlin honored her with an Honorary Golden Bear in 2002. Both are life- time awards, given by festi- vals that helped export Ital- ian cinema when it first went global and that continue to frame it today. There is also her public work away from s e t s , a s s h e s e r v e d a s a UNESCO Goodwill Ambas- sador from March 2000, with a focus on women's rights. It is fair to mention this not as a separate "charity chapter," but as a consistent thread, the public person aligned with how the characters were often read: direct, resilient, and engaged. Writing about her a week after her death, the tempta- tion is to turn the piece into a life summary, but a better way to mark the moment is to suggest what to watch and w h y . S t a r t w i t h t h e t h r e e films that made her an inter- national name; add one or two later titles to see how she adjusted as styles changed and budgets moved. You'll c e r t a i n l y n o t i c e h o w s h e a l w a y s b r o u g h t c l a r i t y t o scenes: in busy frames, often crowded with period detail or genre business, Cardinale d r a w s a t t e n t i o n w i t h o u t grabbing for it, something that was true at the start and remained true in later work. If an obituary is supposed to close a door, hers does not: her work is too present on screen, and the routes into it are too open now to suggest an ending. Instead, it is a moment to acknowledge a c a r e e r t h a t c o n n e c t e d Tunisia, Italy, France, and the United States in a way that feels immensely current and modern. Cardinale stood at the meeting point of art cinema and popular appeal, and that is where many view- ers still meet her today. W h e n s h e c r o s s e d t h e Atlantic to go to Hollywood, Cardinale didn't renounce her artistic identity in the n a m e o f p o p u l a r i t y : s h e made The Pink Panther with Blake Edwards and worked in English when it suited the project, but she did not relo- cate her career. That choice helped preserve the range of r o l e s s h e c o u l d a c c e p t a t home, while keeping her visi- ble to US viewers. A MoMA retrospective organized with Cinecittà and built around restorations of her movies confirms that both institu- tions and the public in the United States saw her as an artist and an art maker, not simply as a Hollywood name. Her choice of roles cer- tainly played an essential part in this context, as she always portrayed very com- plex, multifaceted characters; even when scripts leaned on glamour, her interpretations read as self-possessed, with their own needs and limits. E a r l y i n h e r c a r e e r , t h e industry sometimes dubbed her voice, a standard practice then; later, her distinctive timbre became part of her identity, and it anchored the C laudia Cardi- nale's death last week left us all a little lonelier and culturally poorer than we were. She has been an artist who truly helped d e f i n e I t a l y ' s i m a g e o n screen, and made our cinema travel without losing its iden- tity and nature. With her passing, we lost a measure of our cultural wealth, and the voice through which Italy learned to address the world in film, directly and on its own terms. H e r p a t h t o t h e s i l v e r screen already contained the crossings that later defined h e r i m a g e : b o r n i n L a Goulette, the port district of Tunis, in 1938 to Sicilian par- ents, in 1957 she won a local contest for "Most Beautiful Italian Girl in Tunisia," a small event that brought her to the Venice Film Festival and into the range of casting directors and producers at a time when Italian cinema was expanding fast. The producer Franco Cristaldi was piv- otal during the early years, as he facilitated contracts and roles while carefully manag- ing her public image, allow- ing her rapid entry into a pro- fession she never thought of pursuing as a child. The year 1963 is, per- haps, the most crucial of her career, as Cardinale moved between two productions that still define different ideas of Italian cinema for interna- tional audiences: Fellini's 8 1/2 and Visconti's The Leop- ard. In the former, she is a modern, poised presence in a f i l m a b o u t c r e a t i v i t y a n d memory; in the second she brings warmth and intelli- gence to a period epic con- cerned with class and change. A f e w y e a r s l a t e r , S e r g i o Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West gave her a lead in a w e s t e r n d e d i c a t e d t o a woman's resolve rather than a gunman's code. Very inter- estingly, those three titles are often the gateway for Ameri- cans who first meet her on TV or streaming, then search back through her Italian fil- mography of the 1960s. FRANCESCA BEZZONE Claudia Cardinale: a career that speaks to the present Cardinale in the movie "I Delfini" (1960) (Beni Culturali, Wikicommons. CC BY-SA 4.0). Bottom right, a recent image of Claudia in Prague (Photo: Yakub88/Dreamstime) LIFE PEOPLE PLACES EVENTS

• Cover