Ekberg, La Dolce Vita star who upset Pope, dies at 83
IT was one of cinema’s most iconic moments.
Sashaying through Rome’s Trevi fountain in a strapless black velvet dress, Anita Ekberg was catapulted to the status of an international sex symbol.
Yesterday, the celebrated actress died at the age of 83. Her lawyer Patrizia Ubaldi confirmed her death at a clinic near Rome.
The Swedish-born star, who lived in Italy, had suffered a series of illnesses and went i nto hospital shortly after Christmas.
Famously voluptuous, she made her name with the fountain scene in the 1960 movie La Dolce Vita, which came to define the wild and carefree spirit of the time.
Condemned by the Vatican, it thrilled audiences and helped to make the film a huge success.
In the satire directed by Federico Fellini, Miss Ekberg played a film star called Sylvia who waded through the moonlit fountain in sensual abandon calling to co-star Marcello Mastroianni, ‘Marcello! Come here. Hurry up’. But she l ater recalled how shooting it was far from glamorous. It was March, the water was cold and Mastroianni was falling over drunk on vodka.
‘I was freezing,’ she said. ‘They had to lift me out of the water because I couldn’t feel my legs any more.’ Miss Ekberg – nicknamed The Iceberg because of her Scandinavian roots – grew up with seven siblings in Malmo, Sweden. In 1951, she was crowned Miss Sweden at the age of 20 before moving to the US to compete for the Miss Universe title. Although she failed to win, she suc- ceeded in becoming a model and actress.
Miss Ekberg was constantly in the headlines for her romances with leading men, said to include Errol Flynn and Frank Sinatra.
She married Briton Anthony Steel in 1956, but they divorced four years later. In 1963, she married again to actor Rik Van Nutter, but that marriage also failed.
Despite appearing in a number of other films, including alongside Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda in War and Peace (1956) she had virtually disappeared from the silver screen by the late 1970s.
In later life, she told Entertainment Weekly: ‘When you’re born beautiful, it helps you start in the business.
‘The fountain was freezing!’
But then it becomes a handicap.’
In 2006, Miss Ekberg confessed to a Swedish newspaper that her only regret was never having children. ‘I would have liked to have a child, preferably a son,’ she said. ‘It didn’t turn out that way. That’s life, you just have to accept it.’ She also said she wasn’t afraid of death, adding: ‘I’m just angry because I won’t get the chance to tell others about death, where the soul goes and if there is a life afterward.’
Miss Ekberg ‘didn’t live in luxury in the last few years,’ her lawyer said yesterday. However, she still owned a large villa south of Rome and ‘had many friends who were with her until the end’.