L'Indomabile Claudia Cardinale
Salve ragazzi,
You know how you meet someone and you just immediately LIKE them? I had this experience last Friday when I sat down for a conversation with Claudia Squitieri, in New York City to talk about her mother, L’INDOMABILE Claudia Cardinale. After a half hour, I almost forgot that I’d never actually met her mother because she generously showed me the film star icon in a way that was so genuine and honest. Ms. Squitieri let me see beyond the glamour and into the actual life of her mom, a veritable workhorse.
“It's very difficult for me to even understand how much she was working. I mean, I don't know, during the 50s and 60s, she was doing eight films a year, following the promotions, going around the world. She was never stopping. Her life was extremely intense.”
[Since they are both named Claudia, mother, and daughter, to avoid confusion, I’ll refer to CS, for daughter Claudia Squitieri, and Cardinale for the mother, Claudia Cardinale.]
CS explained the serendipity of her mother’s career. Having won a beauty pageant that she never even entered (“You! Down there in the audience! Come up here - YOU WIN!), and given movie roles when she’d never even considered acting, she developed an unrivaled work ethic.
“She took [her work] as a mission,” explained CS. “She's always been very professional, and I think she realized her great opportunity and luck. I mean, if you came looking for some crazy story about my mother, like many actresses who wanted to be actresses and pushed [her way past other] women. she was just moving along. And people were saying, you have to do this, you have to do that. I don't think she's ever had that kind of like, ‘Stop it! This is too much!’ But at the same time, when she met my father, it really marks the beginning of a new life that she wanted, closer to herself. I realized that her indomitability is as it is for anybody trying to always make one further step towards her true self.”
Though the old studio system was quite controlling for everyone in Hollywood, CS told me how her mom became a bit of a rebel as she grew older.
“Like, you know, always trying to say no. ‘No, I'm not going to America, I feel Italian No, I don't want to do this anymore. I want to be with this man. And I want to live differently. No, I don't want to live in Italy. I'm taking my daughter, I'm going to France, and I'm living with her’.”
So when she was ten, CS and her mother packed up and moved to France, and there, she came to know the world-renowned actress as well as anyone could.
I told CS about a Larry King interview I’d seen years ago with Sophia Loren, and about how Sophia had scolded King for assuming that she’d be annoyed for being seen as a sex symbol. Sophia looked at King like she thought he must be drunk, and then said, “Who wouldn't LOVE that?” I asked CS if her mother would identify with this in any way.
“No, I don't think so. But I don't think she ever really felt she was that way (a sex symbol). She's always been very much with trousers and ties, and Sofia, until recently, was in really short skirts. She was probably about 60 or 65, and she told my mother, ‘You've got to show your legs!’.”
Besides, the fact that Cardinale is a sex symbol is undisputed. Hey, I see the way my husband does a double-take every time he looks at photos like this,
and practically recreates that cartoon jaw drop, “Awooga! Hummina Hummina, Bazooing!”
I’ve been laboring over how to tell you the story that she told me about Quentin Tarantino - I guess I will just quote her. “The first time she met Tarantino, he actually told her that he wanked off to her.” (I said, “That sounds like Tarantino.”)
You have to admit, not everyone has that kind of story to tell about their parent!
That said, Cardinale sounds like a very sweet mother.
“She was very delicate, she didn't take too much space. She wasn't a very invasive mother. She was always off to the side until I was 10. I was raised by a nanny, a second mother, but in France, I was living with my mother. And that's where the bond kind of came. Because she just left everything. We lived in a normal flat, and she would cook for me, and she would take care of me herself. But you know, she left me a lot of independence. It was almost too much, but she trusted me, and that strengthened me. It wasn't like, I don't care. She just trusted me. She was a very easy woman to live with.”
If you want to see the REAL Claudia Cardinale, CS gave us a clue where to find her.
CS says that you’ll find a little bit of the true Claudia in the movie, La Ragazza Con La Valigia (The Girl With A Suitcase), where her mother’s actual personality and mannerisms come through.
“Yeah, it's a beautiful surprise. it comes out through her body language throughout the whole film, you can feel that she has natural gestures that she's trying to adapt in a way that fits a film. But you can feel that she's looking for her movements. And you can feel that she's acting naturally. And then, she's kind of holding it back for it to be cinematographic. I find it more visible in that film than in many others.
And then there is this very strange, mysterious thing that in the film, do you remember, there's the one point they have a lunch, and she speaks about her life. She speaks about this child that she's abandoned, and, I often wondered whether (director/screenwriter Valerio) Zurlini was not aware that this was my mother's actual story. You know, and I'm pretty sure that he knew. So there was that moment in the dialogue, just like my mother's real state. She's actually saying the truth that she's had to abandon a child (having kept her firstborn secret for eight years), that she has the responsibility with a child, that she can't see him, that she's also working to bring in money, which was what my mother was doing. I would have asked, if I had met him, if he knew or if that was just a crazy intuition. You know, because sometimes in life, it could have just been some crazy way of synchronizing with her. But I think he somehow knew.
We always think that we know everything about celebrities, especially these days with social media, but if you want to know Claudia Cardinale, just look into her eyes. We’re drawn to them, but it’s as if she’s inviting us, her audience and the camera, to know her through them. It’s as if she sees everything about us.
If you are lucky enough to be in New York this month, you can catch the amazing Claudia Cardinale Retrospective.
But if not, here are a few of her Italian films you can find here in the USA. She’s in some wonderful Hollywood films, as well, (CS says she really enjoyed the Westerns), but since we’re all about Italian movies here:
Il Magnifico Cornuto (The Magnificent Cuckold)
or here for free, while it lasts.
A sexy comedy with Cardinale and Ugo Tognazzi. (1964)
Il Gattopardo (The Leopard)
1963 epic historical drama film directed by Luchino Visconti and starring Cardinale with Burt Lancaster.
I Soliti Ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street)
1958 Italian comedy caper film directed by Mario Monicelli, and considered to be among the most important masterpieces of Italian cinema. It stars Cardinale with Ugo Tognazzi.
Watch this one for extra credit if you are a student of Italian cinema. (1963)
8 1/2
1963 surrealist comedy-drama directed and co-written by Federico Fellini. It stars Cardinale with Marcello Mastroianni. (1963)
Alla prossima!
Un bacione 💋,
Cheri
America’s Cheerleader For Italian Cinema