Anita Ekberg’s presence in a 1960s sex comedy usually signaled that a wry dig at the likes of Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield was in the offing. The buxom blond Swedish-American actress popped up as eye candy for Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin in “Artists and Models” (1955) and “Hollywood or Bust” (1958), with a stopover in Russia for King Vidor’s 1956 movie version of “War and Peace.”
Still, Ekberg’s indelible early-hours dip into the Trevi Fountain in Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” (1960) remains one of the movies’ most brazenly forward depictions of sensuality, and cinematic shorthand for the power of sexy cinema. Her death Sunday at age 83 is a good reason to revisit that scene, but it’s far from the only reason.
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.
Yet Sylvia is also an innocent, something the great satirist Fellini sees as something less than holy but more than contemptible. What Ekberg brings to “La Dolce Vita” is the sense that the sweet life needs bigger-than-life dreams to keep it alive.
Ekberg’s later movies found her back in walking pin-up-girl mode — as a secret agent in Bob Hope’s “Call me Bwana” (1963); a curve in the comedic mystery made from Agatha Christie’s “The Alphabet Murders” (1966); opposite Lewis again in the space-race lark “Way … Way Out” (1966). But it doesn’t matter: The way Fellini and his camera drenched her in water and symbolism made her immortal.
