The Swedish myth who was immortalized in the Trevi Fountain scene in "The sweet life" died in poverty. Story of a not very sweet life.
There was a minute when she would have wanted to stay and live forever. And she did it. A minute when it was unbreakable. Later, the years, the loneliness, the sadness would break her. But that blessed minute, filmed, archived, magnified by time, would make her return like this every time, eternally frozen within that Nordic beauty and that Fellinesque scene.
She was never the same after crossing the border. Fountain Inside crossed the line from mortal to myth. She just had to close her eyes and show the camera what freezing water felt like on a hot body. That glorious moment of Italian cinema with Marcelo Mastroianni was her blessing and her stigma. We believed that she would always be beautiful, rich, unalterable. There were four decades left before she would feel poverty and wrinkled skin and before she - "broken to pieces" - would decide to go into seclusion.
A white cat, a black dress, golden hair and translucent skin. Although the La Dolce Vita scene has no color, the four tones are differentiated. A statuesque Swede violates the Roman norm, bathes in the Trevi Fountain, and becomes a legend. An ode to the most elegant eroticism. What dozens of Italian priests considered "an aberration" that exalted the most primitive human and animal instincts. As she drilled mandates, Anita Ekberg laughed.
She died in January 2015, when she was already 83 years old, had gone through more than 40 filmings, had few living friends and was too tired. They declared her pauper. A hip fracture had kept her hospitalized far from her home, in a hospital in Rimini, and a group of thieves even took the furniture from her house.
No one could believe such an end for that pale deity, much less the request for help that she had sent to the Fellini Foundation. The director's heirs helped her by taking her to a nursing home. Ekberg was on the front pages for being like any of us: vulnerable, human, fragile.
"I feel a little alone," she stabbed in 2011 with a title that she pierced like a spear at the Italians. "In solitude, yes, but without regretting anything. I loved, I cried, I won and I lost. And I even went crazy with happiness."
Miss Sweden had three names, Kerstin Anita Marianne Ekberg, but the world would know her by her second. She was born on September 29, 1931 in Malmö, southeast of Sweden, in the province of Skåne. The sixth of eight children, she tried her luck in the United States without speaking English. She competed for the title of Miss Universe 1951, she did not win, although in a way she did: as a finalist she obtained a contract with Universal Studios.
At Universal she was taught drama, diction, manners, dancing and even fencing. Thus, she achieved a minimal role in Universal films such as Abbott and Costello Go to Mars and The Golden Blade. When she moved to Paramount Pictures, they tried to promote her as "Paramount's Marilyn Monroe."
A Fellini phrase is repeated and replicated to this day. "Anita's problem is that she believes that all men want to sleep with her. Worst of all: it's true." Anita enjoyed her s---al freedom in an era when enjoyment, and women were not a good combination in the social eye and pointing finger. Fleeting loves, long-lasting loves, "Anitona", as she was affectionately called, she married the English actor Anthony Steel and then the American Rik van Nutter.
Before her fall (the real one and the symbolic one of her) the journalists who rediscovered her with wrinkles asked her ad nauseam about details of the filming of La dolce vita (1960). "It was a whole night of filming in the fountain. I didn't feel cold or any discomfort, but Marcello was shaking and reaching for whiskey and vodka. Three times he fell into the water and three times we had to help him."
Little did she like being reminded so many times of a lost kingdom. But it was inevitable that decades later those curious about her would demand information and secrets from the backstage of La dolce vita, which she filmed at the age of 28. That's why she had to resign herself and repeat over and over again anecdotes such as how the director, outraged by the dirtiness of the water in the fountain, accepted the trick of using green dye to "clean" and disguise the turbulence.
When Fellini died (1993) an anecdote emerged: Anita was the only one who worried at all times about Giulietta Masina, the director's wife. Giulietta asked for forgiveness: "Anita, I always thought badly of you, I thought you were having an affair with my husband. You were the only one who accompanied me at his worst moment, when everyone was erased. I apologize for having mistrusted him."
