The contest brought her to the Venice Film Festival, where she came to the attention of the Italian movie industry. “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. 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. One with Cristaldi and a second with her later companion, Italian director Pasquale Squitieri.