Whatever happened to Hollywood villains?

So long to the most beautiful woman in the world

Claudia Cardinale, who died this week aged 87, was just 14 when Omar Sharif noticed her on a film set in her native Tunisia, says Le Monde, launching a sparkling film career that included starring roles in The Pink Panther (1963) and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in The West (1968). Yet it was a career Cardinale never wanted. Bright and sporty at school, she had ambitions to become a teacher – even after, aged 18, she was voted the “most beautiful Italian woman in Tunisia” and whisked off to the Venice Film Festival. The paparazzi wouldn’t leave her alone – because of her bikini, she later said – and she was soon on the cover of Italian magazines as “the girl who doesn’t want to make movies”.

During her pomp in the 1960s, Cardinale was widely described as “the most beautiful woman in the world”. One journalist called her “nocturnal, delicate, incisive, enigmatic and disturbing”. Director Federico Fellini said she had the face “of a deer, or a cat, passionately lost in tragedy”. She was fiercely independent – once defying Vatican protocol by meeting Pope Paul VI in a miniskirt – and didn’t take her career too seriously, using her Palme d’Or as a doorstop. “I’ve lived more than 150 lives,” she said of acting: “prostitute, saint, romantic, every kind of woman. And that is marvellous.” Looking back, Cardinale said the best compliment she ever received was from David Niven. “Claudia,” he told her, “along with spaghetti, you’re Italy’s greatest invention.”

⛴️😵‍💫 Her last major international role was in Werner Herzog’s 1982 cult classic Fitzcarraldo, in which she played the owner of a Peruvian brothel who funds a madcap scheme to drag a steamboat over a mountain and stage an opera in the Amazon jungle. Filming conditions were atrocious and the lead actor Klaus Kinski had gone dangerously insane. One of the indigenous Indian chiefs working on the set offered to kill Kinski. Herzog only declined because he needed his lead actor to finish filming.

“I didn’t know how hard it would be to get people to be sensible”

When Steve Witkoff began work as Donald Trump’s Middle East peace envoy in January, says Steve Coll in 1843 magazine, he wore his diplomatic inexperience as a badge of pride. The billionaire businessman, an old mucker of Trump’s from the New York real estate world, wanted to do things differently – to transfer his property dealmaking skills to diplomacy. The 68-year-old flies to meetings in his own jet, sometimes accompanied by his girlfriend, a clothing entrepreneur in her thirties, and takes no salary. And he has an admirable lack of formality. He spends hours at a time talking to the families of the hostages held by Hamas, and corresponds with them individually on WhatsApp. He drops F-bombs in meetings with foreign dignitaries. French officials were apparently appalled when he said the Elysée Palace’s gilded decor “looks like Mar-a-Lago”.

At first, this unconventional approach yielded dividends. Frustrated with the intransigence of Israel’s top negotiators – the heads of the country’s foreign and domestic intelligence agencies – Witkoff threatened to use Trump’s clout to have them both fired. The Israelis struck a ceasefire and hostage release deal soon afterwards. But since then his “indefatigable” diplomatic efforts – on Gaza, Ukraine and Iran – have yielded little. State Department officials complain that he is “painfully” naive about the conflicts he is sent to mediate, and regularly turns up to talks without experts or even his own aides. At one early meeting with Vladimir Putin, he mistook one of the Russian president’s translators for an American embassy employee. No one doubts Witkoff’s commitment to the job. But even he admits he wasn’t prepared for how intractable warring parties can be. “I didn’t know how difficult it was going to be,” he says, “to get people to be sensible.”

Skydiving to a fancy dinner at the North Pole

Overcrowding and the piles of rubbish mean scaling Mount Everest is now considered rather “common” among the world’s adventurous rich, says John Arlidge in The Daily Telegraph. Instead, elite travel agents are arranging ever more bizarre and intricate “moments” for clients willing to foot outrageously large bills. One English former banker, Henry Cookson, became the first person to reach the Antarctic “Pole of Inaccessibility” (the point farthest from the sea in all directions, marked for some reason by a bust of Lenin) without mechanical assistance, by kite-skiing and walking all the way there from the Soviet-era Novolazarevskaya research station. Today, Cookson arranges adventures for others: skydiving to a fancy dinner on the North Pole, say, where they camp out and wake up to a sauna and plunge pool carved into the ice. The price? “From $1.2m,” he says, with an emphasis on “from”.

Another adventure holiday firm arranges for clients to climb up Tower Butte, a 1,000ft rock tower in the Arizona desert, and spend the night there all alone (well, except for the chef). “It’s your private mountain top”, says Kevin Jackson, chief executive of EXP Journeys. “The views at dawn and sunset are some of the best in the world.” The reason those with a few quid are reaching for ever stranger and more challenging holidays, says Lauren Ho, of Wallpaper* magazine, is that everything today is so easy. It’s never been simpler to fly across the world to yet another bland, comfy five-star hotel. The places that matter – and that we remember – are the ones that “provoke, confront and make us think long after the journey ends”. What we need is “not ease but resonance”.