During the next decade or so she was kept busy in Hollywood movies, including Blood Alley (1955), a drama with John Wayne, in which she played a Chinese woman 4 for Texas (1963), a Western with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin Call Me Bwana (1963), a comedy with Hope and two comedies with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Artists and Models (1955) and Hollywood or Bust (1956). Her first credited film role was in Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953), in which she played a voluptuous guard on the planet Venus. She did not take home the Miss Universe title but did win a modelling contract and was soon acting as well. She did some modelling as a teenager and was later named Miss Sweden, travelling to the United States as a special guest at the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Kerstin Anita Marianne Ekberg was born in 1931 in Malmo, Sweden, one of eight children of a harbour master. Bob Hope introduced her as “the greatest thing to come from Sweden since smorgasbord” and joked that her parents had won the Nobel Prize for architecture. When she travelled overseas to entertain US troops in the 1950s, it was as a sex symbol. A single moonlit scene – in which she wades into the Trevi fountain in a strapless evening gown, turns her face ecstatically to the fountain’s waterfall and seductively calls Marcello Mastroianni’s character, a jaded journalist, to join her – established her place in cinema history.Įkberg won a Golden Globe, sharing the 1956 award for most promising newcomer with Dana Wynter and Victoria Shaw, but most of her roles focused on her face and figure. In December 2011 it was reported that she was almost penniless, had no family to help her and was seeking financial assistance from the Fellini Foundation while living at a nursing home in Italy, her adopted country.įellini cast Ekberg in La Dolce Vita as a hedonistic American actress visiting Rome. She did make an appearance in 2010 at a film festival in Rome, where a new restoration of La Dolce Vita was having its world premiere.
Anita Ekberg, who has died aged 83, became an international symbol of lush beauty and unbridled sensuality in the 1960 Federico Fellini film La Dolce Vita.Įkberg had kept a low public profile in recent years.