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Claudia Cardinale, Actress Who Was ‘Italy’s Girlfriend,’ Is Dead at 87

Movies|Claudia Cardinale, Actress Who Was ‘Italy’s Girlfriend,’ Is Dead at 87

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/23/movies/claudia-cardinale-dead.html

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Claudia Cardinale, a leading lady of Italian cinema in the 1960s, whose voluptuous beauty was celebrated by the film directors Luchino Visconti, Sergio Leone and Federico Fellini as she drew acclaim as Italy’s “dream girl,” has died in Nemours, France. She was 87.

Her agent, Laurent Savry, confirmed the death to Agence France-Presse on Tuesday. The cause was not reported. Ms. Cardinale had lived in Nemours, south of Paris, in recent years.

Ms. Cardinale, who also starred in a number of Hollywood films, including Blake Edwards’s comedy classic “The Pink Panther,” appeared in more than 150 movies during her six-decade career in Europe.

She was Marcello Mastroianni’s feminine ideal in Fellini’s “8½”; a bordello owner who bankrolls an outlandish scheme by her lover to build an opera house in the Amazon jungle in Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo”; and a widow gunslinger in Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West.”

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Ms. Cardinale with Federico Fellini in 1963 on the set of his “8½,” one of several major films she made in quick succession.Credit...Archive Photos/Moviepix, via Getty Images

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Ms. Cardinale with Sergio Leone during the making of his 1968 spaghetti western, “Once Upon a Time in the West.”Credit...via Getty Images

Ms. Cardinale was often grouped with Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida as the Italian sex symbols of the 1960s and ’70s, though she had a slightly more approachable screen persona, Massimo Benvegnù, an Italian film critic, said in an interview.