Anita Ekberg

ROME: The actress Anita Ekberg, who has died aged 83, is likely to be remembered for a single scene in Rome’s Trevi Fountain, exhibiting her curvaceous charms to an urbane Marcello Mastroianni in Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita.”

Although born and brought up in Sweden, Ekberg spent most of her adult life abroad, first in the United States, where she quickly emerged as one of a 1950’s generation of pin-ups and starlets, and then in Italy, where she died in a hospital outside the capital on Sunday.

Ekberg had attracted attention while still a teenager, winning a beauty contest to become “Miss Sweden” in 1950.

The sixth of eight children, she was born on Sept. 29, 1931 in the southern Swedish port of Malmo, where her father worked as a docker.

Both her mother and her friends had encouraged her to enter beauty contests, and her success quickly took her to the United States, with hopes of becoming Miss Universe.

Although she did not win, Ekberg was quickly noticed by, among others, the cult film director Russ Meyer, the eccentric millionaire businessman and producer Howard Hughes and the actor-producer John Wayne.

In addition to becoming a pin-up for magazines such as “Confidential” and “Playboy,” she appeared in a series of comedy films including “Abbott and Costello Go to Mars” (1953), “Artists and Models” (1955) and “Hollywood or Bust” (1956).

In each case Ekberg’s spectacular physique was made part of the plot, often to comic effect.

When in 1954 she visited a US base in Greenland with the actor William Holden and the comedian Bob Hope, the latter quipped that her parents had been given the Nobel Prize for architecture. It was for the director King Vidor that Ekberg first arrived in Italy, to act in his 1956 film of “War and Peace” along with Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda.

She was then noticed by the great Italian director Fellini, who always had an eye for beautiful women.

He cast her as the dream woman who tempts Marcello Mastroianni in Fellini’s iconic 1960 work “La Dolce Vita” (The Good Life).

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