Claudia Cardinale , the iconic Italian movie star who rose to fame in the 1960s and later became a women’s rights and feminist activist, died earlier this week in France at the age of 87. That comes from the BBC , which quotes her agent, Laurent Savry, as saying that she “leaves us the legacy of a free and inspired woman both as a woman and as an artiste.” Cardinale starred in the original Pink Panther in 1963, and that same year she appeared in Federico Fellini ’s groundbreaking avant-garde masterpiece 8½ — which went on to win Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards.

A few years before that, Cardinale entered show business with the kind of dramatic origin story that seems like it could’ve been taken straight from a movie: As a teenager in Tunisia (where she

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