'Dolce Vita' actress Anita Ekberg dies aged 83: reports

Legendary Swedish actress Anita Ekberg, immortalised by her performance in Federico Fellini's 1960 film "La Dolce Vita", died Jan. 11 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.

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.
      
Ekberg had attracted attention while still a teenager, winning a beauty contest to become "Miss Sweden" in 1950.
      
The sixth of eight children, she was born on September 29, 1931 in the southern Swedish port of Malmo, where her father worked as a docker.
      
Both her mother and her friends had encouraged her to enter beauty contests, and her success quickly took her to the United States, with hopes of becoming Miss Universe.
      
Although she did not win, Ekberg was quickly noticed by, among others, the cult film director Russ Meyer, the eccentric millionaire businessman and producer Howard Hughes and the actor-producer John Wayne.
      
In addition to becoming a pin-up for magazines such as "Confidential" and "Playboy", she appeared in a series of comedy films including "Abbott and Costello Go to Mars" (1953), "Artists and Models" (1955) and "Hollywood or Bust" (1956).
      
In each case Ekberg's spectacular physique was made part of the plot, often to comic effect.
      
When in 1954 she visited a US base in Greenland with the actor William Holden and the comedian Bob Hope, the latter quipped that her parents had been given...