Cinema: Cardinale recalls Squitieri

(ANSA) - Rome, February 20 - Claudia Cardinale on Monday recalled Pasquale Squitieri at her long-time partner and Neapolitan director's funeral at Rome's Church of the Artists.
    "I loved him for his intelligence, his beauty, his culture, and he was also a lot of fun and a bit mad," said the former screen diva of the director she was with for 30 years and with whom she had a daughter.
    "It was me who chose him," she said after arriving on the arm of Squitieri's widow Ottavia Fusco. Fusco clarified that Squitieri, 78, did not die of cancer but "after a car accident".
    She said she had brought with her the lyrics of a song he once wrote for her in Neapolitan dialect.
    Squitieri and Cardinale's daughter Claudine said she greeted with a "wry smile the posthumous support" for a man whose rightwing political views alienated many on the Italian cultural scene.
    "The showbiz world," she said," did not understood his continued dedication to social issues, in which he made some beautiful things, others less so".
    "He had a very deep sense of duty," said Claudine.
    Squitieri started in spaghetti westerns before making a series of politically conscious thrillers.
    In his later years he was a Senator for the post-fascist and now defunct National Alliance party.