The paparazzi may have led to the death of Princess Diana, but those pesky photographers cemented the legacy of Anita Ekberg. The Swedish-Italian actress, who died in January at the age of 83, only inhabits a small portion of Federico Fellini’s 1960 masterpiece La Dolce Vita, yet the image of the busty, blonde actress cavorting in Rome’s Trevi Fountain with star Marcello Mastroianni is the scene considered the film’s most indelible, even outdoing the opening shot of a helicopter carrying a statue of Christ the Laborer over various Roman landmarks.
Ekberg, who was born in Sweden in 1931, began as a model in her teens, eventually winning the Miss Sweden title. She came to the United States to compete for the Miss Universe title in 1951 and though she didn’t win the competition, her looks earned her a contract with Universal Studios and small roles in films such as Abbott and Costello Go to Mars. In fact, Ekberg was more famous for her dalliances with leading actors than her roles on-screen. She was linked with everyone from Errol Flynn to Frank Sinatra to Yul Brynner.
Her acting career languished but she frequently appeared in gossip columns. Ekberg also used her impressive bust size to her advantage, appearing in nudie magazines and various publicity stunts that served as precursors to today’s “accidental” nip-slips. In 1956, she appeared in Playboy magazine in various tantalizing semi-nude photos. But slowly, Ekberg found her way into television and film roles, landing a new home at Paramount Studios, which cast her in five different films in 1956, including its lavish adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Acting talent was always secondary to Ekberg’s looks and Paramount cashed in on her blonde bombshell physique, advertising her as its own Marilyn Monroe.
Ekberg had finally arrived when in 1960 Fellini would cast her in her defining role as Sylvia Rank, a Swedish movie star who comes to Rome on a publicity tour. And despite her appearance in what is considered one of cinema’s most iconic scenes, Ekberg is absent for most of La Dolce Vita, though she burst through its early frames like a force of nature, she is just one in a series of women wooed by Mastroianni’s disaffected journalist Marcello Rubini.
A withering critique of high society and the idle, bored people who live vampiric existences floating from one source of pleasure to another, be it the next party or the next lover, La Dolce Vita is teeming at its sardonic seams with the thrumming life force that defined the director’s work. In a year of other landmark films ranging from Breathless to Psycho, La Dolce Vita won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and even performed well at American box offices, despite this country’s (still present) aversion to unconventional filmmaking and subtitles. For Ekberg, who co-starred with Bob Hope in Paris Holiday and Sterling Hayden in Valerie, it would be the biggest role of her career.
Before Sylvia appears in the film, we learn a good deal about Marcello, a man who used to be a great writer that now earns his keep writing for a gossip column and hanging around with a group of gadfly photographers, including one named Paparazzo, whose name, according to film historian Gary Giddins, was “borrowed from a tavern keeper in George Gissing’s 1901 travel memoir of Southern Italy.” It is a moniker that has stuck, transcending its source material even.
Marcello is a womanizer and although he has a jealous girlfriend in Emma (Yvonne Furneaux), he sleeps with the rich and elegant Maddalena (Anouk Aimée) in the home of a prostitute the two drive home one evening. Sex is an empty experience for the people in La Dolce Vita, something Fellini returns to again and again over the film’s ample running time. At a party near the end of the movie, Marcello and some others cajole a recently divorced woman into performing a striptease and then impassively look on as she removes her clothing. These are characters with nothing else to do and so filled with self-loathing that even the death of two small children is nothing more than fodder for the gossip columns.
This is likely why Ekberg’s appearance is so well-remembered. She is not one of these impotent hucksters and sluts, but the incarnation of perfection, the unattainable woman who Marcello attempts to seduce, but ultimately cannot. Fellini leans heavily on the satire during Ekberg’s sequences, as we follow her arrival to flashbulbs on an airport tarmac, to a race to the top of St. Peter’s that leads her entourage breathless, to a party in a piazza where another American actor insults Sylvia, sending her tearfully into Marcello’s arms and the Trevi Fountain. Ekberg’s Sylvia may be completely vapid, a cypher for the men who control her artistically and romantically, but that doesn’t stop Marcello from falling for her, at least until their evening together ends in daylight and she’s on to the next stop of her tour.
Ekberg would continue making regularly making films until the early ‘70s, but never scaled the heights of La Dolce Vita. She was considered to play Honey Ryder in Dr. No but lost the part to Ursula Andress. She would appear in two later Fellini films, including Intervista (1987) where she reunited with Mastroianni. Even though Fellini gave Ekberg her best role, she was unthankful until the end, even saying in one interview that the director owed her his success. In her later years, Ekberg suffered from a variety of ailments and money woes before finally succumbing to illness on January 11, 2015 in Italy.