Arena — Season 1, Episode 527: Blondes - Anita Ekberg
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
Perhaps best remembered as the shapely blonde who waded into the Trevi Fountain in La Dolce Vita, fifties sex symbol Anita Ekberg became a Hollywood icon and a cult figure in European cinema. This portrait, which concludes the documentary trilogy about screen sirens, tracks down the reclusive Swede in Italy and traces the path of a career that began to take off when she won a Miss Sweden beauty contest. Ekberg talks candidly about growing old, surviving personal disappointment, and the pressure that comes with being recognised as one of the world's most beautiful women.
About Arena
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.