Claudia Cardinale, Italian cinema star known for The Pink Panther, dies aged 87

Claudia Cardinale, the Sixties screen icon who appeared in such classic films as 81/2 and Once Upon a Time in the West, has died. She was 87.

A major star of Italian cinema, she was also known for her appearance opposite Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther (1963).

Her agent, Laurent Savry, told AFP that she died in Nemours near Paris, with her children present.

“She leaves us the legacy of a free and inspired woman both as a woman and as an artiste,” added Savry in a statement.

Cardinale was born in the Tunisian capital Tunis on 15 April 1938. Her film career began shortly after she won a beauty contest in 1957 and was named the “Most Beautiful Italian Girl in Tunisia”.

She made her film debut with a small role opposite Omar Sharif in 1958’s Goha, and came to greater prominence with her performance in Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers in 1960. By the early Sixties, she was one of the best-known stars in Italy thanks to films such as Girl with a Suitcase (1961) and Cartouche (1962).

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In 1963, she reunited with Visconti for the Sicilian epic The Leopard, starring alongside Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon. That same year, Federico Fellini cast her as an actor, also named Claudia, whom film director Guido Anselmi considers his “Ideal Woman” in the meta classic 81/2.

Also in 1963, Cardinale made the transition to Hollywood when she landed the role of Princess Dahla in The Pink Panther. She continued to work regularly in the United States, appearing in such films as The Professionals (1966), Don't Make Waves (1967) and The Hell with Heroes (1968).

She starred with Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda in Sergio Leone’s Western Once Upon a Time in the West, which was also released in 1968.

In 1974, Cardinale met director Pasquale Squitieri, and they became a couple until his death on 18 February 2017, at the age of 78. They frequently collaborated, working together on films such as Blood Brothers (1974), Father of the Godfathers (1978), and Claretta (1984).

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In 1982, she played the love interest of Klaus Kinski in Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog's troubled film about a man who transports a steamship over the Andes mountains in Peru.

The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, just as The Leopard had done almost two decades earlier. In 2007, The Independent’s Jonathan Romney wrote of Cardinale: “Her apotheosis came in 1963, in Visconti's masterpiece The Leopard, which provided a classic Cannes photo opportunity, posing on the beach with Burt Lancaster and a leopard. She was back in 1982, teamed with wild man Klaus Kinski in Fitzcarraldo. She may have felt safer with the leopard.”

She is survived by her children, Claudia Squitieri and Patrick Cristaldi.