Claudia Cardinale Dies: ‘The Leopard’ & ‘Once Upon A Time In The West Actress’ Was 87

Italian actress Claudia Cardinale, known for her roles in The Leopard and Once Upon a Time in the West has died. She was 87.

The actress died in Nemours near Paris, with her children by her side, her agent told French new agency AFP.

Born and raised in Tunis, Cardinale got her big break after she won the “Most Beautiful Italian Girl in Tunisia” in 1957 which came with a trip to the Venice Film Festival, where she caught the attention of film producers.

She made her big screen debut in the 1958 film Goha, starring Omar Sharif, and never looked back.

In her early prime, she was regarded as one of the great European stars of the 1960s, alongside the likes of Alain Delon, with whom she appeared in Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and The Leopard (1963), famously playing Angelica in the latter opposite Delon’s Tancredi.

Other early roles included Valerio Zurlini’s Girl With A Suitcase and Philippe de Broca’s adventure film Cartouche, in which she starred opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo.

Cardinale then broke out internationally, appearing opposite David Niven in The Pink Panther in 1963, and would spend most of the rest of the decade in Hollywood, starring in films such as Blindfold (1965), Lost Command (1966), The Professionals (1966) and Don’t Make Waves (1967) with Tony Curtis.

That period also saw her star in Sergio Leone’s Western Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), as the female protagonist, widowed homesteader Jill Mcbain.