Anita Ekberg

Anita Ekberg: The Goddess of the Trevi Fountain

It was February in Rome, and the water was freezing. When Federico Fellini asked Anita Ekberg to wade into the Trevi Fountain in a strapless black gown and beckon Marcello Mastroianni toward her, she went in and stayed until her legs went numb. "They had to lift me out of the water because I couldn't feel my legs anymore," she recalled. The scene that emerged is among the most reproduced images in cinema, and it froze Ekberg forever in the moment of her greatest fame.

From Malmo to Miss Sweden

Kerstin Anita Marianne Ekberg was born September 29, 1931, in Malmo, the sixth of eight children. She modeled as a teenager, and in 1950, at her mother's urging, entered a beauty contest that led to the Miss Sweden title. That in turn carried her to the 1951 Miss Universe pageant in the United States as a finalist, and though she did not win, the exposure secured a starlet contract with Universal Studios. She spoke little English at the time. Hollywood would shape her image long before it gave her anything substantial to do.

The Hollywood Starlet

At Universal she was drilled in drama, elocution, dancing, fencing, and horseback riding, though she cheerfully admitted skipping acting lessons to ride horses in the Hollywood Hills. Universal dropped her after six months. What kept her in the public eye was her figure and her publicized romances with the leading men of the era. She appeared in minor films including *Abbott and Costello Go to Mars* (1953) and, more prominently, King Vidor's *War and Peace* (1956), shot in Rome, where Paramount marketed her as its answer to Marilyn Monroe. She won a Golden Globe as Most Promising Newcomer in 1955. By the mid-1950s her fee had climbed to $75,000 a picture, and she was one of the most photographed pin-ups alive.

La Dolce Vita

Italy, not Hollywood, made her immortal. Having gone to Rome to film *Sheba and the Gladiator* (1959), she stayed to play Sylvia, the visiting American movie star, in Fellini's *La Dolce Vita* (1960). The film was an international sensation, a portrait of Roman decadence that gave the world both the word "paparazzi" and the vision of Ekberg in the fountain. She became a permanent resident of Italy in 1964. Fellini remained loyal, bringing her back for a cameo in *The Clowns* (1970) and reuniting her with Mastroianni, playing themselves, in *Intervista* (1987).

After the Fountain

Stardom of that magnitude proved a trap. "Things became a little bit boring for me after La Dolce Vita," she said, "because every producer wanted me to recreate the same role." She worked steadily through the 1960s and beyond, in *Boccaccio '70* (1962), *Call Me Bwana* (1963), and dozens of European productions, but never again reached that height. She was considered for the first Bond girl in *Dr. No*, a role that went to Ursula Andress. Her career faded by the late 1970s, and her final appearance came in an Italian television series in 2001.

Why Anita Is Called a Genius

Here honesty is required: Anita Ekberg was not a genius in any intellectual or interpretive sense, and no serious critic has claimed she was. Her gift was not craft but presence, an almost sculptural physical magnetism that the camera, and Fellini in particular, knew how to use. If there is genius anywhere in the Trevi Fountain scene, it belongs largely to Fellini's direction and to the myth-making machinery of Italian cinema; Ekberg herself resented the suggestion that Fellini "discovered" her or "made" her famous. What she supplied was raw iconography, the ability to embody a fantasy so completely that a single image outlived her by decades. That is a real and rare quality, but it is closer to the model's art than the actor's, and her admitted indifference to formal training underscores the point. To call Ekberg a genius would be to confuse fame with brilliance. The truer statement is that she was a face and a form through which one of cinema's greatest directors created something unforgettable, an instrument of genius rather than its author.

Legacy

Ekberg's later years were hard: financial ruin, a fire, a robbery, a hip broken by her own Great Dane, and a spell described as destitute before her death on January 11, 2015, in Rocca di Papa, Italy. She was cremated and buried, as she wished, in Sweden. Yet the image endures with undimmed power. In 2021 Monica Bellucci built a film, *The Girl in the Fountain*, around her memory. Ekberg remains the definitive symbol of la dolce vita, the sweet life, a woman who stepped into cold Roman water one winter night and never left the popular imagination.

Achievements

• Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actress — 1956
• Educated at Malmö Borgarskola
• Worked as fashion model, film actor and beauty pageant contestant