‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ Star Claudia Cardinale Dead at 87

Legendary Italian actress Claudia Cardinale has died. She was 87.

She died late last month at her home in Nemours, a town near Paris, France. “She leaves us the legacy of a free and inspired woman both as a woman and as an artiste,” said her agent, Laurent Savry, to AFP.

If you haven’t heard of her, Cardinale is so famous and so important to film history that both Italy’s president Sergio Mattarella and France’s president Emmanuel Macron released statements on her death, with Macron saying that the people of France “will always carry this Italian and world star in our hearts, in the eternity of cinema.”

Her career as a leading lady lasted eight decades and she appeared in over 175 films, many of which—like Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West and Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2—are considered to be among the greatest of all time. In 2011, the LA Times named her one of the most beautiful women in cinema history.

Cardinale is best known to Americans for her leading role in the 1963 comedy thriller The Pink Panther, which also starred David Niven and Peter Sellers, and for her part in the 1966 Western film The Professionals starring Burt Lancaster. She starred in several more Hollywood films before becoming jaded by the American industry and returning to Europe. In 1982, she starred as the love interest in Werner Herzog’s classic adventure film Fitzcarraldo.

She continued to work in her old age, with her final two on-screen roles being in the Netflix original film Rogue City and in the Tunisian-Italian drama The Island of Forgiveness.

Cardinale is survived by her two children.