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| Photographed by Peter Basch, Vogue, August 1956 |
Remembering Screen
Siren and Fellini Muse
Anita Ekberg
“When you’re born beautiful, it helps you start in the business. But then it becomes a handicap,” Anita Ekberg, the incredibly stunning, famously pneumatic Swedish-born actress once observed.
Ekberg, who passed away Sunday at the age of 83, was best-known for the scene in Federico Fellini’s 1960 La Dolce Vita, where she wades into the Trevi Fountain and beckons Marcello Mastroianni to join her. She is playing an American movie star, and her wanton behavior recalls the antics of another notorious splasher, Zelda Fitzgerald, whose flapper dive into the Plaza fountain, decades before Ekberg’s character’s plunge, revealed the same hedonistic, joyous spirit.
In actual life, Ekberg was a complicated character. Fellini was by far her best director; she also appeared in, among other vehicles, Abbott and Costello Go to Mars. She married twice and had romances with matinee idols like Tyrone Power—their affair was obsessively chronicled by the salacious gossip magazines of the 1950s. If her powerful sexiness was a bit of a prison, she sometimes reveled in her gilded cage, reportedly admitting that an incident where her dress popped open in the lobby of a London hotel was hardly an accident, but a prearranged stunt with a waiting photographer.
Ekberg was no shrinking violet and certainly no mere bubble-headed pinup. Bluntly outspoken, in 1999 she told an interviewer that the world “would like to keep up the story that Fellini made me famous, Fellini discovered me." But in fact, she insisted, it was the other way around.
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