Claudia Cardinale, star of '8½' and 'The Leopard,' dies at 87

ROME (AP) — Acclaimed Italian actor Claudia Cardinale, who starred in some of the most celebrated European films of the 1960s and 1970s, has died in France, her agent said Wednesday. She was 87.

Cardinale died in Nemours, France, surrounded by her children, her agent Laurent Savry told The Associated Press.

Praise for Cardinale's talent, beauty and impact on the European cinema poured in on Wednesday, with French President Emmanuel Macron saying, “We French will always carry this Italian and global star in our hearts, in the eternity of cinema.”

Cardinale starred in more than 100 films and made-for-television productions, but she was best known for embodying youthful purity in Federico Fellini’s “8½,” in which she co-starred with Marcello Mastroianni in 1963.

Cardinale also won praise for her role as Angelica Sedara in Luchino Visconti’s award-winning screen adaption of the historical novel “The Leopard” that same year and a reformed prostitute in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western “Once Upon a Time in the West” in 1968.

Italian Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli offered condolences to Cardinale’s family and hailed Cardinale’s beauty and “exceptional talent” that inspired “milestones” of Italian cinema.

“With the death of Claudia Cardinale, one of the greatest Italian actresses of all time has passed away,” he said in a statement late Tuesday.

Cardinale 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.

“The fact I’m making movies is just an accident,” Cardinale recalled while accepting a lifetime achievement award at the Berlin Film Festival in 2002. “When they asked me ‘do you want to be in the movies?’ I said no and they insisted for six months.”

Her success came in the wake of Sophia Loren’s international stardom and she was touted as Italy’s answer to Brigitte Bardot. While never achieving the level of success of the French actor, she nonetheless was considered a star and worked with the leading directors in Europe and Hollywood.

“They gave me everything,” Cardinale said. “It’s marvelous to live so many lives. I’ve been living more than 150 lives, totally different women.”

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.

The sensuous brunette with enormous eyes was often cast as a hot-blooded woman. As she had a deep voice and spoke Italian with a heavy French accent, her voice was dubbed in her early movies.

Her career in Hollywood brought only partial success because she was not interested in giving up European film. Nonetheless, she achieved some fame by teaming with Rock Hudson in the 1965 comedy thriller “Blindfold” and another comedy “Don’t Make Waves” with Tony Curtis two years later.

Cardinale herself considered the 1966 “The Professionals,” directed by Richard Brooks as the best of her Hollywood films, where she starred alongside Burt Lancaster, Jack Palance, Robert Ryan and Lee Marvin.

In a 2002 interview with the Guardian, she explained that 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.”

“And I had a big opportunity with Richard Brooks, ‘The Professionals,’ which is really a magnificent movie,” she said. “For me ‘The Professionals’ is the best I did in Hollywood.”

Among her industry prizes was a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement that she received at the Venice film festival nearly 40 years after her initial appearance on screen.

In 2000, Cardinale was named a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. 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.

Simpson, the principal writer of this obituary, retired from The Associated Press in 2013. John Leicester contributed from Paris.

FILE - Italian actress Claudia Cardinale attends a press conference during the 2nd Budapest Classic Film Marathon in Budapest, Hungary on Sept. 6, 2018. (Tibor Illyes/MTI via AP, File)

FILE - Actress Claudia Cardinale appears in 1965. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Italian actress Claudia Cardinale appears in Rome on Dec. 13, 1966. (AP Photo/Mario Torrisi, File)

FILE - Italian actress Claudia Cardinale appears at the Prix Lumieres awards ceremony in Paris on Jan. 18, 2013. (AP Photo/Zacharie Scheurer, File)

LONDON (AP) — Laws that will make it illegal to create online sexual images of someone without their consent are coming into force soon in the U.K., officials said Thursday, following a global backlash over the use of Elon Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok to make sexualized deepfakes of women and children.

Musk's company, xAI, announced late Wednesday that it has introduced measures to prevent Grok from allowing the editing of photos of real people to portray them in revealing clothing in places where that is illegal.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer welcomed the move, and said X must “immediately” ensure full compliance with U.K. law. He stressed that his government will remain vigilant on any transgressions by Grok and its users.

“Free speech is not the freedom to violate consent," Starmer said Thursday. “I am glad that action has now been taken. But we’re not going to let this go. We will continue because this is a values argument.”

The chatbot, developed by Musk's company xAI and freely accessed through his social media platform X, has faced global scrutiny after it emerged that it was used in recent weeks to generate thousands of images that “undress” people without their consent. The digitally-altered pictures included nude images as well as depictions of women and children in bikinis or in sexually explicit poses.

Critics have said laws regulating generative AI tools are long overdue, and that the U.K. legal changes should have been brought into force much sooner.

A look at the problem and how the U.K. aims to tackle it:

Britain's media regulator has launched an investigation into whether X has breached U.K. laws over the Grok-generated images of children being sexualized or people being undressed. The watchdog, Ofcom, said such images — and similar productions made by other AI models — may amount to pornography or child sexual abuse material.

The problem stemmed from the launch last year of Grok Imagine, an AI image generator that allows users to create videos and pictures by typing in text prompts. It includes a so-called “spicy mode” that can generate adult content.

Technology Secretary Liz Kendall cited a report from the internet Watch Foundation saying the deepfake images included sexualization of 11-year-olds and women subjected to physical abuse.

“The content which has circulated on X is vile. It is not just an affront to decent society, it is illegal,” she said.

Authorities said they are making legal changes to criminalize those who use or supply “nudification” tools.

First, the government says it is fast-tracking provisions in the Data (Use and Access) Act making it a criminal offense to create or request deepfake images. The act was passed by Parliament last year, but had not yet been brought into force.

The legislation is set to come into effect on Feb. 6

“Let this be a clear message to every cowardly perpetrator hiding behind a screen: you will be stopped and when you are, make no mistake that you will face the full force of the law,” Justice Secretary David Lammy said

Separately, the government said it is also criminalizing “nudification” apps as part of the Crime and Policing Bill, which is currently going through Parliament.

The new criminal offense will make it illegal for companies to supply tools designed to create non-consensual intimate images. Kendall said this would “target the problem at its source.”

The investigation by Ofcom is ongoing. Kendall said X could face a fine of up to 10% of its qualifying global revenue depending on the investigation’s outcome and a possible court order blocking access to the site.

Starmer has faced calls for his government to stop using X. Downing Street said this week it was keeping its presence on the platform “under review."

Musk insisted Grok complied with the law. “When asked to generate images, it will refuse to produce anything illegal, as the operating principle for Grok is to obey the laws of any given country or state,” he posted on X. “There may be times when adversarial hacking of Grok prompts does something unexpected. If that happens, we fix the bug immediately.”

FILE - Workers install lighting on an "X" sign atop the company headquarters, formerly known as Twitter, in downtown San Francisco, July 28, 2023. (AP Photo/Noah Berger, File)