“To do this work you have to be strong inside otherwise you lose your personality,” says Italian screen siren Claudia Cardinale of acting.
“I don’t have a driver. I don’t need a bodyguard. I get to take my newspaper myself and go around on my own. If people come up to me and I want them to leave I say ‘go away’.”
Her strength appears to know no bounds. At 74, her personality, along with quick-witted humour, are still well intact.
The actress was honoured with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival on Friday night along with Egyptian acting legend Sawsan Badr.
“Why do you think I wear so much jewellery on my fingers?” she laughed a loud, unrefined laugh and pointed at four large rings on her fingers.
Casually puffing on slim cigarette after slim cigarette, the legendary actress is never short of conversation.
Most famous internationally for the “brains and beauty” she brought to Blake Edward’s all-time-hit, The Pink Panther in 1963 co-starring Peter Sellers and David Niven, Cardinale has fought her whole life.
“At school I would fight with the boys,” she said. “My father made me a bag made out of wood so I could defend myself. I wanted to show women were strong.
Cardinale’s strength translated when Hollywood came calling, point blank refusing to sign an exclusive contract with a movie studio.
Yet, Cardinale’s film career began with reluctance. Born in the port town of La Goulette, Tunisia, at the time a French protectorate, to second-generation Sicilian parents, Claudia’s mother tongue is French and at 18 the bombshell couldn’t speak Italian.
Picked from a crowd and thrust into the spotlight, Cardinale was elected Most Beautiful Italian in Tunisia in a contest at a film event she hadn’t even entered.
“They put a sash over my shoulder and I was declared the winner,” she recalls still in disbelief.
Her prize — a trip to the Venice film festival where the first film I saw was Visconti’s Le Notti Bianche [White Nights].”
Without much enthusiasm her cinema career began, reluctantly in a short called Anneaux d’Or (Golden Ring) by René Vautier screened at the Berlin Film Festival and soon after she was cast to appear in a Tunisian film, Goha, by Jacques Baratier in a supporting role with Omar Sharif playing the lead role.
“I’m doing cinema because I refused,” she said, likening it to a man chasing a woman who doesn’t want to be pursued.
“If he desires you he will stay around. As soon as you say yes, he is not interested.”
Language difficulties and “no interest” saw her drop out of the Centro Sperimentale di inematografia in Rome after just three months.
“My teachers were my directors,” she says.
Teenage pregnancy, her son Patrizio born in Tunisia, motivated her in the end and the roles kept flooding in. Almost six decades later and the roles are still coming.
Appearing in 103-year-old, Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira’s Gebo and the Shadow, at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, Cardinale insists her energy keeps her going.
“A few years ago I was with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at the Venice Film Festival and Oliveira was on the stage because they gave him a prize and he said I love Claudia Cardinela. After he called me and said ‘I want you in my next movie.’”
Shot in just 25 days Cardinale says it was “like a theatre” saying she was inspired by the energy of a man just about to celebrate his 104th year on the planet. “Before a scene he would come after doing sports. Every time we finished a scene he kissed me. He has a fantastic energy.”
So too does the feisty Italian.
“I’m always working and I travel all the time,” she said. “My energy stays high. I’m fighting for lots of things. For women, for men, the children of Cambodia. This is very important to be the voice of people who cannot speak. Normally at my age you don’t work. I never did lifting,” she said pointing to her wrinkles. “You cannot stop the time. Life goes by. My mother says ‘they don’t see that you’re getting old because you’re always smiling.’”
Claudia’s honesty extends to all lines of questioning. Openly admitting her biggest regret was not starting an affair with Marlon Brando.
“My two idols are Brigitte Bardot and Marlon Brando. I was in my hotel one night and I heard ‘tac, tac, tac’ at the door. In the end all he said was ‘Claudia you are an Aries like me.’ I closed the door and said to myself ‘you are so stupid.’”
Though happy to tell the story Cardinale says she’s happy she has been judged on her career rather than her personal life saying “I never want to be judged in my life, only in my work.”
To date CC has appeared in around 90 feature films but her most productive decade remains 1960-1970 when she clocked up some 30 movies including the classics 8½ (1962-3), The Leopard (1963), and the Westerns, The Professionals (1966) co-starring with Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin and the cult movie Once Upon a Time In The West (1968) directed by maestro Sergio Leone.
A fling with Brando she may regret but what about regrets in her long and varied film career? “No regrets. You can’t. It’s your destiny. If you don’t do something it’s because you didn’t have to. Before, cinema was an adventure now it’s just a business. Normally you only live one life. But with cinema you live many.”
Cardinale is perhaps best summed up by her Pink Panther co-star Niven. “If you ask me,” he said. “Claudia Cardinale is, after spaghetti, Italy’s happiest invention.”
