Claudia Cardinale visits UNS theatre, meets Azerbaijani first lady

Baku, February 14 (AzerTAc). A meeting with Italian actress Claudia Cardinale has today been held at the UNS Creative Stage in Baku. Azerbaijani first lady Mehriban Aliyeva, Vice-President of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation Leyla Aliyeva and Arzu Aliyeva attended the meeting. The event started with the screening of extracts from films starring Claudia Cardinale as the main character. Filmmaker Ayaz Salayev highlighted the life and work of the Italian actress. The meeting featured an interview with Claudia Cardinale. Claudia Cardinale was born in La Goulette, a neighborhood of Tunis, Tunisia, in 1938. In 1957, Cardinale won the Italian embassy's 'Most Beautiful Italian Girl in Tunisia' contest. The contest included a trip to the Venice Film Festival, bringing Cardinale to the attention of the Italian movie industry. Her feature film debut was Goha (1957), a French-Tunisian co-production. Throughout the 1960s, she appeared in some of the most acclaimed Italian and European films of the period, including Luchino Visconti's Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers 1960) and Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963), Philippe de Broca's Cartouche (1963), Federico Fellini's Otto e mezzo (8½ 1963), and Sergio Leone's epic Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Because Cardinale was not interested in leaving Europe for extended periods of time, she never made a real attempt to break into the American market. The list of her Hollywood films includes The Pink Panther (1963), Circus World (1964), Blindfold (1965), The Professionals (1966), Don't Make Waves (1967), and Son of the Pink Panther (1993). Founder and artistic director of the UNS Creative Stage Nargiz Pashayeva thanked the Italian actress for the meeting.