In the spring of 1961, the novelist and journalist Alberto Moravia conducted an unorthodox interview with Claudia Cardinale for Esquire. He announced at the outset that he would be speaking to her as if she were an object. ‘An object like this table, this armchair, this book?’ she replied. ‘That’s right,’ said Moravia. When Cardinale enquired as to why he seemed to have no interest in her past or her opinions, he replied: ‘Because these are debatable, uncertain and changeable things […] they do not distinguish you in any way, but rather make you similar to so many millions of others.’ What distinguished Cardinale, he said, was ‘what you are as an object that is different from all other objects; what you are as an apparition.’
Rakewell was reminded of this ironic exercise in subverting the media gaze when Cardinale died earlier this week at the age of 87: she was, after all, one of cinema’s most powerful apparitions. As well as inducing obsessive fandom far and wide – one waiter in Brazil reportedly proposed to her by mail, posted a marriage notice in his church and changed his name to Mr Cardinale – she appealed to the leading directors of the day as a feminine ideal. In Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), about a film-maker struggling to make his next movie, the director’s fictional stand-in has recurring visions of an ‘ideal woman’ he dreams of casting. For this role Fellini cast not Sophia Loren or Brigitte Bardot but the 24-year-old Cardinale, and where previous directors had had her voice dubbed by other actors – she grew up in Tunisia speaking French, Arabic and Sicilian dialect, and spoke no Italian until her twenties – Fellini insisted that Cardinale’s voice be heard in all its French-accented mellifluousness. The apparition was complete.
Paradoxically, her status as an icon was accompanied by the sense that she was approachable, relatable: ‘Italy’s girlfriend’, as the New York Times put it in the headline of its obituary. Rakewell would like to point out, however, that not many girlfriends – or boyfriends – speak six languages (the other two in Cardinale’s case being English and Spanish) or ever fail to look less than fabulous. In 2019 she sold her wardrobe from the late 1950s to the early ’80s at Sotheby’s in Paris; it was in the ’80s that she met Giorgio Armani, who went on to be a lifelong friend, dressing her for many a red-carpet appearance. Their deaths so close together seem to signal the curtain coming down on a certain era of Riviera glamour.
Cardinale believed strongly in the power of art. In 2022 she founded the Fondazione Claudia Cardinale, which supports artists – particularly women artists and those with an interest in sustainability – in the region of Seine-et-Marne, where she lived until her death. And though the illustrious company she kept was more in the world of film than art, Rakewell is sure that if she had ever met David Hockney she could, on a good day, have smoked him under the table: she got through two packs a day until quitting at the age of 85.
Moravia’s characterisation of her as an apparition may have seemed unkind, but it was an aspect of her existence she embraced. Although she never had plastic surgery, she took umbrage at criticisms of the airbrushing of her figure on a poster for the Cannes Film Festival in 2017. ‘This image has been retouched to accentuate this effect of lightness and transpose me into a dream character,’ she said. ‘This concern for realism has no place here.’