Italian actress Claudia Cardinale, whose real name was Claude Josephine Rose Cardinale, has passed away at the age of 88, according to ANSA.
Her agent, Laurent Samri, told Corriere della Sera that the actress died surrounded by her children in Nemours, near Paris, where she lived in the last years of her life.
The Tunisian-born French-Italian actress starred in more than 150 films and was the muse of legendary directors Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti.
Italian Culture Minister Alessandro Giulio Cardinale called her "one of the greatest Italian actresses of all time."
Claudia Cardinale was born on April 15, 1938, in La Goulette, near Tunis. At the age of 17, she won a beauty contest and was recognized as the "Most Beautiful Italian Woman in Tunisia" and participated in the Venice Film Festival. There, she attracted the attention of several directors.
In the early 1960s, Visconti cast Cardinale in the films "Rocco and His Brothers" and "The Leopard". The actress also entered the history of cinema with Sergio Leone's 1969 classic "Once Upon a Time in the West". American audiences mainly recognized her from the film "The Pink Panther".
Claudia Cardinale won the "Golden Lion" in Venice in 1993 and the "Golden Bear" in Berlin in 2002.
It should be noted that she also played the character of Arax in Henri Verneuil's film "Mother".
