Anita Ekberg, the Swedish-born actress who is indelibly intertwined with her iconic role in director Federico Fellini's 1960 masterpiece, La Dolce Vita, died Sunday morning in Italy after a long illness, [reports] (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/movies/anita-ekberg-la-dolce-vita-actress-dies.html) The New York Times. She was 83.
Ekberg had been in the hospital since Christmas following a series of illnesses. The actress had been in a wheelchair for several years after she broke a hip after being knocked down by one of her pet Great Danes.
The voluptuous blonde, whose charms were immortalized in the Bob Dylan song “I Shall Be Free”, was crowned Miss Sweden in 1951, which brought her to the States, where she modeled for men’s magazines like Playboy and Confidential, and a career in Hollywood soon followed. She found roles in movies opposite such leading men as Henry Fonda, John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, and Bob Hope, but it was La Dolce Vita that made her a star.
The film, which also starred Marcello Mastroianni, featured Ekberg strolling the streets of Rome wearing a kitten as a hat and, in one of the cinematic world’s most iconic scenes, wading through Rome's Trevi fountain in a strapless gown, which cemented her status as a sex symbol.
“When you're born beautiful, it helps you start in the business. But then it becomes a handicap,” she told Entertainment Weekly in a 1999 interview.
Ekberg was romantically linked to a number of Hollywood's leading men, including Frank Sinatra, Gary Cooper, Yul Brynner and Errol Flynn, and was married twice—to actor Anthony Steel from 1956 to 1959, and Rik Van Nutter from 1963 to 1975.
In 1956, Ekberg won a Golden Globe as a promising newcomer for her work in the film Blood Alley, where she was inexplicably cast as a Chinese woman. It’s likely that the producers of the Globes are scrambling to plan a tribute to the star at tonight’s show.
