Claudia Cardinale dead: Hollywood actress and star of The Pink Panther passes away

Award-winning Hollywood actress Claudia Cardinale - whose film career spanned more than 60 years - has died.

Cardinale was best known for embodying youthful purity in Federico Fellini’s 8½, and for her work on Luchino Visconti’s award-winning screen adaption of the historical novel The Leopard in the 1960s. She played a reformed prostitute in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West in 1968, which was the springboard to larger films in Hollywood.

But her more recent work was again on Italian and French cinema, for which she received awards, including a lifetime achievement award at the Berlin Film Festival in 2002 and the Best Actress gong at the 47th Antalya "Golden Orange" International Film Festival in Turkey in 2010. Cardinale, though, aged 87 died on Tuesday at her home in Nemours, France, surrounded by her children.

The star began her movie-career at the age of 17 after winning a beauty contest in Tunisia, where she was born of Sicilian parents who had emigrated to North Africa. The contest brought her to the Venice Film Festival, where she came to the attention of the Italian movie industry. Before entering the beauty contest, she had expected to become a school teacher.

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Yet, confident Cardinale was quickly touted as Italy’s answer to Brigitte Bardot, a French actress who became known for portraying characters with hedonistic lifestyles in the 1960s. While never achieving the level of success of the French actor, Cardinale nonetheless was considered a star and worked with the leading directors in Europe and Hollywood.

And one of her earliest roles was as a black-clad Sicilian girl in the 1958 comedy classic Big Deal on Madonna Street. It was produced by Franco Cristaldi, who managed her early career and to whom she was married from 1966 to 1975.

Cardinale went onto play dozens of diverse roles in her 65-year career, including a character in The Professionals in 1966 alongside Burt Lancaster, Jack Palance, Robert Ryan and Lee Marvin. She also teamed up with Rock Hudson in comedy thriller Blindfold and another comedy Don’t Make Waves with Tony Curtis in the 1960s. Cardinale worked alongside David Niven when she portrayed Princess Dala in The Pink Panther, a popular hit across the US.

But the defiant young performer went back to European cinema after becoming jaded with Hollywood. In a 2002 interview with the Guardian, the mum explained the Hollywood studio "wanted me to sign a contract of exclusivity, and I refused. Because I’m a European actress and I was going there for movies."

In 2000, Cardinale was named a goodwill ambassador for the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization for the defense of women’s rights. She had two children. One with Cristaldi and a second with her later companion, Italian director Pasquale Squitieri.