Claudia Cardinale was part of the great wave of Italian movie stars whose postwar career took them from Europe to Hollywood; these included Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida and Monica Vitti, who the American film industry prized not merely for their beauty but also for their mystery: an exotic feline allure and sense of toughness and survival, and even tragedy. But Cardinale perhaps had something her contemporaries didn’t: a kind of simplicity and frankness to go with the sensual allure. She often played opposite Alain Delon, whose own beauty complemented – almost merged with – hers.
In Visconti’s early masterpiece Rocco and His Brothers from 1960, Cardinale played Ginetta, engaged to one of Rocco’s brothers from the uncouth south and her parents are openly hostile when their son-in-law’s entire family make their chaotic appearance. She was radiant in Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard in 1963, as wealthy merchant’s daughter Angelica on whom Burt Lancaster’s Prince bestows his frank admiration even as she is engaged to his nephew Tancredi, played by Delon. In the famed final ball sequence, she plays her part by inviting Lancaster’s ageing lion to dance, and perhaps also to offer him an elegant symbolic exit from his own prestige.
