Film List on CINEGEEK.DE Claudia Cardinale 

Claudia Cardinale, THE female film star of post-war Italian cinema and certainly of her era, has died at the age of 87. Raised in Tunis in a family with Sicilian roots, she came to film in 1957 after winning a beauty contest in Tunis. She had to be dubbed for her first roles, as she grew up speaking French. Those familiar with her biography know that she became pregnant at an early age in an abusive relationship. For years, she passed her son off as her little brother. He was born in 1958 and grew up with his grandparents. By 1963 at the latest, she was internationally famous thanks to Fellini's 8 1/2 and Visconti's The Leopard (in whose epic Rocco And His Brothers she appeared in 1960). These films paved her way to Hollywood; Blake Edwards' Pink Panther was also made in 1963, followed by Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West in 1968. You will surely notice that she appeared in four of the best films of all time in a short period of time! In the early 1970s, however, she suffered a career setback when she separated from producer Franco Cristaldi. Cristaldi called for a boycott of Cardinale. At the end of the 1970s, she appeared in a mini-series by Franco Zeffirelli, Jesus of Nazareth, and in 1982 in Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo (and that makes five of the best films of all time!). Unlike Brigitte Bardot, for example, we are familiar with Cardinale's films. In this sense, she is not a star, but above all an ACTRESS who also had a theater career. What we know about Cardinale as a person is that she stood for the independent, free-spirited women of her time and appeared at a meeting with the Pope wearing a miniskirt. Later, she turned almost entirely to the theater, where she achieved great success. In 2002, she visited us in Berlin and was honored for her life's work—a life that, according to Cardinale, encompassed more than 150 lives!