Anita Ekberg: The Swedish Bombshell Who Conquered Hollywood and Fellini's Rome
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There's a moment in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita where Marcello Mastroianni follows Anita Ekberg into Rome's Trevi Fountain at night. She's wading through the water in a strapless black evening gown, arms spread wide, completely unhurried, calling his name into the dark. The Baroque masterpiece of a fountain is right there behind her, and you barely notice it. That's the kind of presence Anita Ekberg had.
Born Kerstin Anita Marianne Ekberg on September 29, 1931, in Malmo, Sweden, she was one of eight children. Her father was the harbour master. She became a model as a teenager, won the title of Miss Malmo, then Miss Sweden in 1951. The beauty pageant circuit gave her a trip to America for the Miss Universe competition, and America, recognising what it was looking at, promptly kept her.
From Miss Sweden to Howard Hughes
She didn't win the Miss Universe title, but she didn't need to. A 1951 Life magazine story called her "the most photographed, most pursued and most popular girl" at the Miss America contest in Atlantic City. Hollywood notices that kind of coverage. Howard Hughes signed her, and Universal Pictures put her to work.
Her first credited screen role was as a Venusian guard in Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953), which is either a humiliating start or a delightful one depending on your perspective. Ekberg always seemed to find it funny. She had a good sense of humour about the absurdity of the sex symbol business, which helped her survive it.
The career-defining moment before La Dolce Vita came in 1954, when she was brought in as a last-minute replacement for Marilyn Monroe on a Bob Hope Christmas tour to entertain American GIs in Greenland, one of the first Hope specials filmed for television. Stepping into Marilyn Monroe's place and not getting destroyed by the comparison took nerve. Ekberg pulled it off.
Playboy and the Pin-Up Years
In 1955, Playboy featured a full pictorial on Ekberg, complete with the dutiful publication of her measurements: 39-22-37. The magazine and its relationship with the era's bombshells is something worth understanding properly: it wasn't just titillation. It was a cultural machine that processed European glamour, American pin-up tradition, and Hollywood publicity into something that genuinely shaped how mainstream America thought about female sexuality in the 1950s.
The tradition Ekberg was working in had deep roots. The Ziegfeld Follies showgirl photography of Alfred Cheney Johnston from the 1920s had established the idea that photographing beautiful women as an art form was culturally legitimate. By the time Ekberg arrived in America in the early 1950s, that legitimacy had been fully absorbed into the mainstream. Posing for Playboy wasn't a career risk of the kind it would have been a generation earlier. It was, for someone with Ekberg's profile, practically expected.
What made Ekberg distinctive in photographs, beyond the obvious, was her physical scale. She was 5'9" and built on genuinely statuesque proportions that photography of the era struggled to handle gracefully. The best photographs of her from this period have a monumental quality, something almost sculptural. She wasn't just pretty; she was overwhelming.
La Dolce Vita and the Image That Stuck
By 1960, Ekberg had been working steadily in Hollywood for most of a decade. Good roles had come: War and Peace (1956), Hollywood or Bust (1956) with Jerry Lewis, a string of European productions. But nothing had made her immortal. Then Federico Fellini cast her as Sylvia in La Dolce Vita, and everything changed.
Fellini later said the idea for the film was inseparable from the idea of Ekberg herself. She played a visiting American celebrity, endlessly photographed and pursued, a walking embodiment of the new media culture of fame that the film was partly about. Which meant she was essentially playing herself, with Fellini's camera turning her into exactly the kind of overwhelming image the story was critiquing. It was a perfect loop.
The Trevi Fountain sequence, shot in January 1960, took all night to film. The water was freezing, according to every account. Ekberg reportedly waded in without complaint while Mastroianni needed a wetsuit under his suit to endure it. The resulting images, both from the film itself and from the production stills taken that night, are among the most reproduced in cinema history.
“She possessed incredible beauty," Fellini once said. "I had never seen anyone like her. The luminous colour of her skin, her clear ice-blue eyes, golden hair, exuberance, joie de vivre, made her into a grandiose creature, extra-terrestrial and at the same time moving and irresistible.”
She always maintained, with some amusement, that Fellini owed his reputation to her rather than the other way around. Whether or not that's strictly accurate, it captures something true about the dynamic. La Dolce Vita needed Ekberg to work. She was the gravitational centre of the whole film.
The "Handicap" of Being a Sex Symbol
Later in life, Ekberg described her sex symbol status as a "handicap," which is a bracing word but a revealing one. The problem with being defined by a single image, however iconic, is that it becomes almost impossible to be seen as anything else. After La Dolce Vita, audiences wanted Ekberg to repeat the Trevi Fountain forever. Filmmakers cast her in increasingly superficial roles that played on the bombshell persona without giving her anything interesting to do with it.
She worked steadily through the 1960s but the quality of roles dropped. There's a pattern here that you see across the careers of the great mid-century sex symbols: the machinery that creates the icon is also the machinery that traps it. Mansfield, Monroe, Ekberg, all found that the persona they'd helped construct became a kind of prison.
In 1982, at the age of 50, she posed for a set of glamour photographs that were widely discussed in the Italian press. She was living in Italy by then, had been for years, and had become something of a permanent fixture in Roman cultural life. Five years later, Fellini brought her back for Intervista (1987), a semi-autobiographical film in which she and Mastroianni appear as themselves, watching footage of their younger selves from La Dolce Vita. It's one of cinema's genuinely moving moments.
The Photographs, and Why They Matter
For enthusiasts of classic glamour photography, Ekberg's archive is exceptional. Her American pin-up and Playboy work from the mid-1950s sits within a very specific tradition, one that connects back through Hollywood glamour photography all the way to the Studio Manasse in Vienna and the broader European tradition of photographing the female form as something worthy of artistic attention.
The Italian work, the production stills and publicity photographs from the Fellini years, has a different quality entirely: more cinematic, more consciously artistic, influenced by the Italian approach to image-making that was itself in conversation with everything from neorealism to the European art house tradition.
Playboy's own historians placed Ekberg at number 14 on their list of the 100 sexiest stars of the century in 1999, with Monroe at number one. That ranking tells you something about how the magazine understood its own history: Ekberg was foundational. She was part of the first generation of international stars who helped establish what the magazine was for.
Ekberg wasn't just a face in a magazine. She was part of a conversation about beauty, fame, and the female body that was happening across the 1950s and 1960s simultaneously in Hollywood, in European cinema, in Playboy's pages, and in the work of photographers who were quietly building a visual language that still shapes how we see glamour today. That's the tradition this community is here to celebrate.
Anita Ekberg died in Rome in January 2015, aged 83. She never had children, something she later said she regretted. She'd lived in Italy for most of her adult life, the country that had given her her greatest role and her enduring fame. Appropriately, she'd decided it suited her better than anywhere else. She was right.
