Italian actress Claudia Cardinale has died at 87, following a glittering decades-long film career in both Hollywood and Europe.

In English-speaking roles, she is best remembered as the transformed prostitute Jill in the 1968 spaghetti western “Once Upon a Time in the West,” and as a displaced princess with the world’s largest diamond in the 1963 comedy “The Pink Panther,” alongside Peter Sellers.

In Italy, she was celebrated for her captivating performances in films like Luchino Visconti’s grand historical drama “The Leopard,” which significantly influenced “The Godfather,” and the iconic Federico Fellini film “8½.”

Her stardom reached its zenith during the 1960s, a time when French and Italian cinema shone brilliantly on the international stage. She shared the screen with prominent actors such as Henry Fonda, Marcello Mastroianni, Alain Delon, Burt Lancaster, and Sean Connery.

Cardinale died with her children present this Tuesday in the French commune of Nemours near Paris, her agent Laurent Savry told AFP.

‘She leaves us the legacy of a free and inspired woman both as a woman and as an artiste,’ Savry said in a message announcing her passing.

Italian actress Claudia Cardinale has died at 87, following a glittering decades-long film career in both Hollywood and Europe

In English, her best-loved roles include reformed prostitute Jill in the 1968 spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West

Born to a Sicilian family in French Tunisia, she spoke almost no Italian when she won a contest in 1955 to be named ‘most beautiful Italian woman in Tunis’ and attended the Venice Film Festival as her reward.

She wore her bikini on the Lido and left producers enraptured, but movies at that point held no temptation for her and she rebuffed their professional advances. 

‘I was very young, fierce, modest, almost wild. And without the slightest desire to exhibit myself on film sets,’ she told Le Monde in 2017.

Cardinale wanted to become a teacher, but at age 19 she was raped by a Frenchman and fell pregnant with her son Patrick, so she signed with Italian producer Franco Cristaldi and entered showbiz in Rome to make enough money to support her son.

‘It was for him that I did it. For Patrick, this baby that I wanted to keep despite the circumstances and the enormous scandal that an out-of-wedlock birth could cause at the time,’ she recalled decades later.

She gave birth in secret and, on Cristaldi’s advice, pretended throughout his early childhood that Patrick was her brother, concealing the truth even from her son.

‘I filmed pregnant, but no one noticed, because the waistband of dresses at the time were right under the bust,’ she explained.

Cardinale had already made her debut with a small part in the 1958 movie Goha led by Omar Sharif, and that same year in Rome she entered the Italian film industry with another minor role in the classic comedy caper Big Deal on Madonna Street.

She is pictured leaning on French heartthrob Alain Delon in Luchino Visconti’s sweeping 1963 period drama The Leopard, which was a major influence on The Godfather

Her major roles include an exiled princess who owns the world’s biggest diamond in the 1963 comedy The Pink Panther with David Niven (left)

Cardinale is pictured at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival where she presented the Federico Fellini movie 8½, one of her many collaborations with Marcello Mastroianni

She filmed well into her final trimester of pregnancy and then – depressed to the point of suicidal ideation – she asked the producer to let her out of her contract, whereupon he arranged for her to discreetly give birth to Patrick in London. 

Cardinale then plunged back into Italian cinema and worked vigorously to earn money for her child, establishing herself as one of the era’s femme fatales.

In the 1960 drama Il bell’Antonio, she was so captivating that her co-star Marcello Mastroianni fell in love with her in real life, only for her to reject him, dismissing him as the sort of actor who always became besotted with his leading ladies.

Also in 1960, she acted in Luchino Vischonti’s social drama Rocco and His Brothers, marking her first collaboration with the director and with Alain Delon.

In 1961, she finally attained recognition as not only a bona fide star but also a well-regarded serious actress, thanks to Valerio Zurlini’s film Girl with a Suitcase.

Cardinale led the film as a young nightclub singer who became a mother as a teenager, a character close enough to her actual life that she brought a striking authenticity to the role – but also needed months before filming to steel herself for the mental pressures of reenacting problems that so painfully mirrored her own.

Showered with praise by the critics, she entered a period of stardom that spanned the cinema of not only western Europe but also the United States and Soviet Union. 

In 1963 she featured in Vischonti’s seminal historical drama The Leopard, about the upheaval in Sicily amid the reunification of Italy in the 1960s.

Cardinale delivered a luminous performance as the beautiful aristocrat Angelica, who becomes swept up in a romance with Alain Delon’s Tancredi, a wheeler-dealer who knows how to deftly take advantage of the ructions engulfing the Italian peninsula.

Burt Lancaster led the film as Tancredi’s uncle and Angelica’s godfather Don Fabrizio, an aging relic of a courtlier age, whose final dance with Angelica is a moment of both sizzling chemistry and aching wistfulness for the vanishing world of the nobility.

She demonstrated her versatility with a comic turn in Blake Edwards’ original 1963 movie The Pink Panther alongside Peter Sellers as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau.

Cardinale featured as the exiled Princess Dala who owns the world’s biggest diamond, amid a cast including David Niven and Robert Wagner.

The year 1963 also saw Cardinale featured in the cast of Federico Fellini’s opus 8½, widely regarded to be a self-reflexive piece about a movie director haunted by the memories of all the women who profoundly impacted his life.

Mastroianni led the cast as filmmaker Guido Anselmi with Cardinale as one of his actresses, amid a glittering array of the era’s European stars like Anouk Aimée as his estranged wife and Sandra Milo as his mistress.

The 1960s proved to be a galloping decade for Cardinale’s career, with highlights including Sergio Leone’s 1968 epic Once Upon a Time in the West.

In a top-flight cast including Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson and Jason Robards, Cardinale was a standout as former prostitute Jill McBain, who by the time of the film’s events is the ravishing, indomitable widow of a murdered rancher.

Robards’ outlaw character Cheyenne has a famous line in which he tells her: ‘You know, Jill, you remind me of my mother. She was the biggest w**** in Alameda and the finest woman that ever lived. Whoever my father was – for an hour or for a month – he must have been a happy man.’