'En ninguna película había logrado aún la inarticulación total que ahora lo dominaba': Marlon Brando conoce a Sophia Loren en el estreno en Roma de On the Waterfront, 1954. Photo: Keystone
Marlon Brando fury at ‘feeling like a freak’ among revelations in new book of Hollywood secrets
This article is more than 6 months old
Brando, Ava Gardner, Anita Ekberg and other A-listers are featured in a memoir about the glamour of the 1950s film industry
Dalya Alberge Saturday 4 January 2025
Marlon Brando was the original angry young man, winning an Oscar for On the Waterfront, Elia Kazan’s movie about union corruption. But anger got the better of him at the 1954 Italian premiere of the film, when he refused to watch it after discovering that his voice had been dubbed, a new book reveals.
An impromptu performance of Nino Rota's score for the Federico Fellini film took place at the Trevi Fountain in Rome.
Samantha Bergeson Oct 20, 2022 8:00 pm
“La Dolce Vita” inspired a sweet flash mob performance of the iconic film score in Rome.
Composer Nino Rota crafted the soundtrack to Federico Fellini’s Oscar-winning 1960 classic about a tabloid journalist (Marcello Mastroianni) who searches for the beauty of Rome over the course of a week. The soundtrack is getting a re-release via record label CAM Sugar, and led to an impromptu performance of select “Dolce Vita” songs in front of the iconic Trevi Fountain in Rome.
Anita Ekberg, who passed away Sunday, was best-known for the scene
in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, where she wades into the Trevi Fountain.
Lynn Yaeger
January 12, 2015
“When you’re born beautiful, it helps you start in the business. But then it becomes a handicap,” Anita Ekberg, the incredibly stunning, famously pneumatic Swedish-born actress once observed.
Marcello Mastroianni and Anika Ekberg
La Dolce Vita
La Dolce Vita / The Sweet Life
Federico Fellini, 1960
Steve Rose Wednesday 20 October 2010 11.32 BST
Previously associated with neo realist tales of poverty and hardship, Federico Fellini's career, and Italy's public image, took a sudden shift here. It was time to replace those associations of bombed-out, postwar landscapes with hip, thriving modern culture in all its glory and squalor.
Always a master of the grand tableau, Fellini captures Rome in staggering breadth, from the opening aerial shots of the city, the narrow streets, prostitutes' bedrooms through to aristocratic homes and around the historic landmarks on the back of a Vespa. He's like a tireless, voluble tour guide; you're never quite sure where he's going but you're compelled to follow.
Marcello Mastroinanni and Anita Ekberg
La Dolce Vita
His protagonist, Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), is also led along for much of the picture, a journalist on the trail of the next story or in thrall to the new idols of the age, such as the Hollywood starlet Sylvia (Anita Ekberg), after whom he wades into the Trevi fountain in the film's most famous scene.
Rubini is the epitome of continental suaveness, but he's a conflicted soul, prey to the city's tensions – between tradition and modernity, morality and hedonism, fantasy and reality. It's easy to forget how fresh and bold this all was at the time, and how the film was condemned by the Catholic church and Italian patriots, among many others.
Voluptuous Swedish actor who starred in Fellini’s 1960 classic film La Dolce Vita
Ronald Bergan and John Francis Lane The Guardian, Sunday 11 January 2015 13.54 GMT
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.
Both Tashlin and Fellini had found a way of using the former Miss Sweden in erotic satire. She was born in the city of Malmö, on the south-western tip of Sweden, the sixth of eight children of August, a doctor, and his wife, Alvah. Having been crowned Miss Malmö and then Miss Sweden, Ekberg went to the US in the early 1950s for the Miss Universe contest and stayed to appear in a number of Hollywood films. These included The Golden Blade (1953), an Arabian Nights tale starring Rock Hudson, in which she played a handmaiden, and Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953).
Ekberg was asked to be merely decorative in a few further exotic adventure tales, such as Zarak (1956), in which Victor Mature portrayed an Afghan outlaw; and to be a stooge to Jerry Lewis in Artists and Models (1955) and Hollywood or Bust, and to Bob Hope in Paris Holiday (1958) and Call Me Bwana (1963). Her looks were used more effectively in King Vidor’s War and Peace (1956), in the role of Hélène, the adulterous wife of the besotted Pierre Bezukhov (Henry Fonda).
Anita Ekberg in War and Peace, 1956
Larger dramatic roles followed in B-movies, including Screaming Mimi (1958), a bizarre psychological thriller in which she performs striptease numbers at a sleazy nightclub called El Madhouse, and gets attacked while taking a shower – two years before Psycho. In Valerie (1957), she appeared opposite Anthony Steel, whom she had married in 1956.
It was said that the career of Steel, one of Britain’s biggest movie stars in the 50s, was ruined when he married Ekberg and moved to Hollywood. There, he struggled to find much work and was often referred to by the tabloids as Mr Ekberg. Their stormy marriage ended in 1959. One of their public arguments, while being pursued by the paparazzi in Rome, was said to have inspired some scenes in La Dolce Vita.
After that film, Ekberg, never much of an actor, became a prisoner of her own image. She posed for Playboy, Bob Dylan named her in the song I Shall Be Free, and she appeared in a number of mediocre international productions including The Mongols (1961) and Four for Texas (1963), in which the director Robert Aldrich concentrated on Ekberg’s bust, especially as she leans over Frank Sinatrawhile shaving him.
Four for Texas, 1963, which starred Frank Sinatra
After an unhappy second marriage, to the actor Rik Van Nutter, which lasted from 1963 to 1975, Ekberg drank heavily and gradually gained a great deal of weight. She lived alone in a grand villa in the country near Rome, guarded by two Dobermans. After a fire and a break-in at her house, she moved into a care home and in 2011 sought financial assistance from the Fellini Foundation.
When invited to celebrate the 40th anniversary of La Dolce Vita she declined, but in 2009 agreed to appear in a BBC documentary. Previously, Fellini visited her in his film Intervista (Interview, 1987), in which there is a moving reunion between Mastroianni and Ekberg, who nostalgically watch their key scene from La Dolce Vita together. Ronald Bergan
John Francis Lane writes: When Federico Fellini asked me to play one of the reporters milling around at the news conference of the movie star played by Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita, I suspected he only vaguely remembered what I’d told him of my experience as a real reporter at her wedding to Anthony Steel.
At the time of the wedding, I was Rome stringer for the British newspaper the News Chronicle. It could not afford to send its showbiz columnist to Florence so I went instead. The wedding, at the Palazzo Vecchio, was attended by 50 members of the press. When we got back to the hotel, the luminaries rushed to their rooms to write their gilded prose, while I, knowing how unreliable the Italian phones were, thought it a good idea to ask the telephonist if there were problems getting through to London. She offered me a line immediately.
What to do? I took a chance. Laboriously I started adlibbing the article, following my first instinct which had been to send it all up. I had only the pay-off in my head: “The next morning they will be back on the real film set.” I came out of the booth sweating and trembling, and, as I stumbled towards the bar, who should suddenly appear but Ekberg, still in that fabulous white dress with one bare shoulder that I had just ridiculed. Seeing me, the only one of her “wedding guests” around, she beckoned me to join her for a glass of champagne.
What had I done? I had dared to make fun of a goddess. It was the end of my hopes of becoming a foreign correspondent. I sipped my champagne and gulped desperately as I saw my illustrious colleagues fighting to get a line to London for what would certainly be their rapturous accounts of the fairytale we had been privileged to witness.
When I next saw Ekberg, on the set of La Dolce Vita, she was more concerned that Fellini might be sending her up. Of course he was, yet I heard him console her affectionately: “But Anitona, how could I? You are meant to be Ava Gardner!” Her marriage was brief, but thanks to Fellini, the Nordic goddess became immortal.
• Kerstin Anita Marianne Ekberg, actor, born 29 September 1931; died 11 January 2015
Far from La Dolce Vita: broke and alone, Ekberg cries for help
MICHAEL DAY Rome, Friday 23 December 2011
Her years as a Sixties film icon must seem a very long time ago now for Anita Ekberg. For the Swedish actress, who entered cinema history the moment she stepped into Rome's Trevi Fountain during the celebrated scene in Federico Fellini's 1960 masterpiece La Dolce Vita, has fallen on very hard times indeed.
Things are so bad, that three months after her 80th birthday, the actress has asked her accountant, Massimo Morais, to request financial help from the Fellini Foundation, which was set up to honour the achievements of the renowned Italian director.
Ekberg, who has no family, says she desperately needs assistance with the bills as she recuperates in a care home after suffering a broken leg. She is unable to walk or look after herself and her plight has been exacerbated by the theft of jewellery and some furniture from her home, which to compound her misery, was recently damaged by a serious fire.
Mr Morais, who is acting on Ekberg's behalf on the orders of the court of Velletri, outside Rome, says his client wants to return to her home but will not be able to without help to repair the building.
In the letter to the Fellini Foundation in Rimini, Mr Morais writes that the actress "wants to share with other benefactors the possibility, however modest, of aiding a very good actress, deserving of help. A small present is always a great gift".
But Ekberg's call for help comes at a tough time for the Fellini Foundation, set up in 1995 by Maddalena Fellini, the late director's sister, and the City of Rimini to promote the filmmaker's legacy; the organisation has seen its accounts slip in to the red, and has had to ask for charitable donations.
Fellini's film, with its critical look at the high society of late-1950s Rome, marked the peak of Ekberg's career, but it was also the start of her decline as she became typecast as the ultimate blonde sex symbol.
During the height of her fame, Ekberg was courted by some of the world's most eligible and wealthy men, including Frank Sinatra, who asked her to marry him.
Leading lady: Her rise to fame
Anita Ekberg, who was born in Malmo in 1931 and went on to become Miss Sweden, came to the world's attention in the 1956 comedy Hollywood or Bust, in which she starred alongside Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and won a Golden Globe.
But it was the scene in La Dolce Vita in which she cavorts with the Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni in the Trevi Fountain, that ensured the voluptuous actress's place in Hollywood legend. She was married to the British actor Anthony Steel between 1956 and 1959 and later the minor Hollywood actor Rik Van Nutter.
The list of other men to whom she has been romantically linked reads like the cast-list of a 1960s Hollywood blockbuster – Mastroianni, Frank Sinatra, Errol Flynn and Yul Brynner.
Anita Ekberg, iconic star of La Dolce Vita and 60s sex symbol, dies aged 83
Anita Ekberg, the striking blonde Swedish actress whose sashay through Rome's Trevi fountain in "La Dolce Vita" made her an icon of cinema, died Sunday at 83 at a clinic near the Italian capital, local media reported.
The Swedish-Italian film icon died in Rocca di Papa, a small town southeast of Rome, due to complications from a longtime illness, the New York Times reported.
Ekberg's busty bombshell Sylvia an actress whose arrival in Rome, and subsequent tour of the Eternal City, captivates a jaded, perpetually prowling glamour photographer (Marcello Mastroianni) is another of Fellini's signposts for decaying civilization and the empty deification of celebrity.
Ekberg went on to star in many more films. She was married twice: to actor Anthony Steel from 1956 to 1959, and Rik Van Nutter from 1963 to 1975.
Ekberg, who was born in Malmo, Sweden, saw her career take shape after she was crowned Miss Sweden in the early 1950s.
Her curvaceous body and glamorous social life made Ekberg a favorite of the tabloid press in the 1950s and 1960s.
(Associated Press). But even as she became one of Sweden's most famous exports, Ekberg maintained a problematic relation with her native country.
(The article features several photographs of Ekberg attempting a fish face, which was then de rigueur among American fashion models.) Two years later, she had attracted enough attention to land her first credited film role, in Abbott and Costello Go to Mars.
In 1951 she won the Miss Sweden competition, after being recommended to enter by organizers who saw her on the street, and went to the United States to compete for the Miss Universe title.
Her performance in War and Peace, alongside Henry Fonda and Audrey Hepburn, would catch the attention of one Fellini and set the ball rolling for that fateful bath in a Roman fountain.