Anita Ekberg, 'Dolce Vita' actress, dies

Legendary Swedish actress Anita Ekberg, immortalised by her performance in Federico Fellini's 1960 film "La Dolce Vita", died yesterday near Rome, media reports said. She was 83.

The voluptuous film star, a longtime resident of Italy, died in a hospital outside the Italian capital, according to the website of the daily La Repubblica.

Ekberg is likely to be remembered for a single scene in which she cavorts in Rome's Trevi Fountain, exhibiting her curvaceous charms to an urbane Marcello Mastroianni in Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita".

Although born and brought up in Sweden, Ekberg spent most of her adult life abroad, first in the United States, where she quickly emerged as one of a 1950's generation of pin-ups and starlets, and then in Italy, where she died in a hospital outside the capital yesterday.

The film won Fellini the Golden Palm award at the Cannes Film Festival of the same year, and the fountain scene rapidly became one of the most famous images in cinema history.

Ekberg was to star in several other major Italian films, including "Boccacio 70," (1962), co-directed by Fellini and Vittorio De Sica and also starring Sophia Loren, plus Fellini's circus film "I Clowns" (1970) and his "Intervista" (1987), also featuring Mastroianni.

In 2011 the Turin daily La Stampa reported that at the age of 80 the former star asked for financial help from the Fellini Foundation. She lived in a residence for elderly people near to Rome after breaking her hip.

Ekberg was married twice, firstly to the British actor Anthony Steel between 1956 and 1959 and then to the American actor Rik Van Nutter between 1963 and 1975. Both marriages ended in divorce and there were no children.