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This handout picture released on March 29, 2017 by the Cannes film festival shows the official poster of the 70th Festival de Cannes featuring a picture of Italian actress Claudia Cardinale dancing. Critics say Cardinale’s legs were airbrushed thinner. Photo: AFP

She’s one of the most beautiful women in screen history. So why did Cannes airbrush Claudia Cardinale’s thighs?

The official poster for this year’s Cannes film festival sparked an outcry Wednesday over complaints that renowned Italian actress Claudia Cardinale’s thighs had been airbrushed to make them thinner.

French media poured scorn on the festival for seemingly tampering with a photograph of a young Cardinale swirling her skirt on a Rome roof in 1959.

“Claudia Cardinale dropped a dress size in one swirl,” said the left-leaning Liberation, while the culture magazine Telerama questioned why it was necessary to retouch the famously sexy star when she was in her heyday. Cardinale was listed as one of the 50 most beautiful women in cinema by the Los Angeles Times in 2011.

Claudia Cardinale achieved fame, both as a skilled actress and as one of the most beautiful women in cinema. Photo: Supplied
“While the poster is magnificent, the photograph has clearly and deplorably been airbrushed to thin the actress’s thighs. What a pity,” it said.

There was a similarly hostile reaction on social media, with one Twitter user saying, “If even Claudia Cardinale cannot represent beauty without being retouched, we really are in trouble.”

Another version of the controversial poster featuring Italian actress Claudia Cardinale. Photo: Reuters
Others bemoaned the “dictatorship of thinness” or claimed that “Cardinale wasn’t thin enough for Cannes”.

But the actress, now 78 and a long-time women’s rights activist, was unimpressed by what she called a “fake row”.

“This image has been retouched to accentuate this effect of lightness and transpose me into a dream character,” she told Huffington Post.

“This concern for realism has no place here and, as a committed feminist, I see no affront to the female body. There are many more important things to discuss in our world. It’s only cinema.”

Cardinale said in a statement released by the festival that she was honoured to feature on the poster for its 70th anniversary year.

“That dance on a roof in Rome... reminds me of a time when I could never have imagined climbing up the red-carpeted steps of the most celebrated” film festival in the world.

But Claire Serre-Combe, of the French women’s group Osez le feminisme! (“Dare to be Feminist”), said it was a scandal that Cardinale who was “thin and magnificent in the original photo”, should have to “lose kilos” for the poster.

The festival’s director Thierry Fremaux said the poster had been “very well received”.

Tunisian-born Cardinale starred in some of the greatest European films of the 1960s and 1970s including Federico Fellini’s and Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard. She would also achieve fame in Hollywood.
The original 1959 photo of Claudia Cardinale, mid-twirl. Photo: Supplied

The furore comes as Fremaux is whittling down the line-up for the festival, which will run from May 17 to 28.

Claudia Cardinale was acclaimed in both European cinema and Hollywood. Photo: Supplied
Sofia Coppola’s US Civil War story The Beguiled, starring Colin Farrell as a wounded soldier who is given refuge in a girl’s boarding school, is hotly tipped to make the main competition.

Coppola’s previous hits Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette also premiered on the Croisette, and her new film comes with the starry trio of Nicole Kidman, Elle Fanning and Kirsten Dunst.

Fellow US indie director Todd Haynes is also among those thought to have made the cut with Wonderstruck his time-shift story of two deaf children starring Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams.

French Oscar winner Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist), whose film on the cinema revolutionary Jean-Luc Godard is called Redoutable, is also likely to be back this year.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: ‘Thin thighs’ row rattles Cannes
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