In Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), a tipsy blond starlet, wearing a black low-cut dress, wanders into the Trevi fountain in Rome. She tries to entice her escort to join her by calling “Marcello, Marcello” in seductive tones. The scene made the Swedish-born Anita Ekberg, who has died aged 83, a sex symbol par excellence. “She had the beauty of a young goddess,” Fellini said. “The luminous colour of her skin, her clear ice-blue eyes, golden hair and exuberance, joie de vivre made her into a grandiose creature, extraterrestrial and at the same time moving and irresistible.” Her co-star, Marcello Mastroianni, was initially less impressed: “She reminded me of a German soldier of the Wehrmacht who in a round-up asked me into a truck.” However, after a week of getting wet in the fountain and drying her frocks in the sunlight, Ekberg gained his respect and even affection.
The director Frank Tashlin once commented: “There’s nothing more hysterical to me than big-breasted women – like walking leaning towers.” Ekberg was a beautiful, tall, voluptuous leaning tower in Tashlin’s punningly titled Hollywood or Bust (1956). Later, in Le Tentazioni del Dottor Antonio (The Temptation of Dr Antonio), the Fellini episode from the omnibus film Boccaccio 70 (1962), she was the gigantic model who comes down from her billboard promoting milk to pursue a puritan who has campaigned against the advert.
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