Claudia Cardinale: Dancing with Italian beauty!

Claudia Cardinale always has men ready to kneel at her feet, including notorious cowboys. Claudia Cardinale can control crocodiles, lions or leopards with her bare hands, despite the most famous directors staring in horror through the camera lens…

That is the girl dancing on the poster of the 70th Cannes International Film Festival, taking place from May 17 to 28. She is… 78 years old this year!

At the time of receiving the crown of “most beautiful Italian girl in Tunisia”, where her family had lived for generations, Cardinale was still just an innocent girl who knew little about life.

In the dressing room of the theater where the contest was taking place, a member of the organizing committee suddenly grabbed Cardinale’s hand and pulled her onto the stage before the jury had made its final decision.

As a result, Cardinale won the crown even without participating!

The prize of the contest was a trip to the Venice Film Festival, where film producers and directors had been pestering Cardinale’s parents to let their daughter act in films.

Cardinale did not want to. In fact, she thought she was not beautiful.

When Cardinale arrived in Mostra, Venice in 1955, people begged her to star in a film. Reluctantly, Cardinale accepted, and now – like a loyal man – the movies have not let her go.

Cardinale made her first film at the age of 16. She was then invited to study in Rome under the guidance of Tina Lattanzi.

Returning to Tunisia in 1965, Cardinale discovered she was pregnant after being raped by a French pilot. The powerful Italian producer Franco Cristaldi arranged to become the child’s godmother.

In return, Cardinale agreed to sign an 18-year contract and a legalized marriage to Cristaldi, who would dictate everything from her weight to her hairstyle. Cardinale naively accepted.

She was not good at calculating. She averaged four films a year and was paid a modest monthly fee.After the marriage ended, she found happiness with director Pasquale Squitieri and considered him “The only man in my life”. The couple lived together from 1975.

However, her career at that time was not as good as in the 1960s when she worked with great directors such as Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti.

In 1963, she collaborated with both filmmakers, playing two roles at the same time considered the peak of her career in 8½ and The Leopard .

The strange thing, according to her, was that working with Visconti was like working on a professional stage, while with Fellini it was improvisational and without a script. And everything still happened in the screams of both sides.

For The Leopard , Cardinale had to have long hair and dye it black. But director Federico wanted her to have blonde hair in 8½ .

And so every day, she changed her hair color once to suit both parties’ requirements. If Luchino respected the precision down to the millimeter, on the set of 8½ , director Federico would prompt the lines, the main actor Marcello would repeat them and Cardinale would respond. And so they completed the film.

It was Fellini’s hilarious “Circus” that paved the way for Cardinale’s first Hollywood role. In 1964, she starred in Henry Hathaway’s Circus World . “That was my great film.

And because I was a little crazy, I didn’t want to use special effects, so I did the lion fight, and everyone outside was yelling at me that I was crazy.”

Cardinale lived in America for a long time. Director Paul Newman gave her a house. She made many good films in Hollywood and was asked to stay and sign a long-term contract. But Cardinale said no. “I am European. I have to go back to Europe.

When I started, my dream was to travel all over the world .” Cardinale was the only woman to go to the Amazon at that time. She danced for two hours with the natives completely naked, while she, on the other hand, until later, never did a nude scene.

During the breaks between films, she gave her energy to women, so there was no time for plastic surgery. “ I never had a facelift. My mother said: Forget it, when you get old, the wrinkles will form as if you were smiling. That’s the truth. So why hide it?”

With a face with a typical Mediterranean smile, born into a Sicilian family with ancestors from Isla Mujeres, Claudia Cardinale did not speak a word of Italian at the time she was cast in the film Girl with a Suitcase (Valerio Zurlini, 1961).

Claudia Cardinale was born in Tunisia. At home, her parents spoke French, so French was considered her mother tongue.

As a child, Claudia Cardinale was not a talkative child, but whenever she spoke, she often emphasized words to argue with men as a way to prove that women were just as talented as men. As a result, her voice sounded exactly like a man’s.

Without a voice, Claudia Cardinale was one of the few actresses of the 1960s who represented the image of a strong woman.

At the age of 80, she was not afraid of changes in appearance, still opened her house to welcome reporters, told them the strange story of her life, and was ready to knock out young men with an arm wrestle.

During her lifetime, famous actor David Niven made a valuable statement about Claudia Cardinale: “Along with spaghetti, she is the best ‘invention’ of Italy “.

The two filmmakers Pasolini and Moravia came to the same conclusion: along with Sophia Loren, she was the actress who had the greatest influence on the idea of ​​beauty in Italy and in world cinema in general.

As for Claudia Cardinale, she certainly had the characteristics of an ordinary woman: she loved chocolate, idolized the legendary star Brigitte Bardot, with whom she once walked down the Champs-Elysées in a tight-waisted dress. And she, despite being a beauty icon, always avoided saying: “Yes, I am beautiful”.

Pursuing naturalism is Cardinale’s philosophy of life. And a person like Cardinale rarely goes to war with anyone, because she is not greedy for fame and is not interested in fame: “For me, work is work and my life is something else. I have many male colleagues.

They are all very good friends of mine and none of them can lock me up with a ring. I am a free woman.” A self-proclaimed rebel, she learned everything about acting on the set without ever attending an acting school.