Anita Ekberg, sex symbol and La Dolce Vita star, is dead at 83

Actress Anita Ekberg, a former Miss Sweden who won international fame for playing actress Sylvia Rank in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960), died on Sunday in a town outside Rome, her adopted home. She was 83.

Ekberg had been in several Hollywood films — starting with Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953) — before Fellini cast her as Rank, and was already a sex symbol. But La Dolce Vita shot her into international fame — specifically, a scene in which she wades into Rome's Trevi Fountain in a strapless dress, luring in a journalist played by Marcello Mastroianni. The scene shocked audiences and earned condemnation from the Vatican, but she was unmoved.

"I'm very proud of my breasts, as every woman should be," she said. "It's not cellular obesity, it's womanliness."

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Ekberg fell on hard times in her later years, reportedly penniless, her Rome villa damaged in a fire, and confined to a wheelchair after one of her Great Danes knocked her down. She was married twice, divorced since 1975, had a string of affairs with famous men, and had no children. She was a bit lonely late in life, "but I have no regrets," she told Rome's Corriere Delle Sera on her 80th birthday. "I have loved, cried, been mad with happiness. I have won and I have lost." Watch the famous Trevi Fountain scene below. --Peter Weber