Anita Ekberg, the Trevi Fountain-dancing star of La Dolce Vita, passed away today. Here is an article about her.
Here is the iconic scene from Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” that gave us the term “Paparazzi” (Paparazzo was an annoying photojournalist in that film).
So what is it about a young starlet that is so appealing? Keats wrote in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
There are many theories of aesthetic proportion that involve Fibonacci ratios and the Golden Ratio as you can read here. But perhaps you could substitute a “Y” for the “T” and also consider Youth to be Beauty. That is the point I try to make in the second half of this interview I did for a local Vietnamese TV program:
Now imagine if all 20-year-old actors received a telomerase activator and never grew old. Think of the young and nubile Anita Eckberg at 140, writing, directing, producing and starring in her own satire of La Dolce Vita from Sylvia’s perspective, not the Fellini proxy of Marcelo Mastroianni’s charcter. There are many stars of film that already take TA-65 secretly so you never know about what the future holds for actors who roll back down the hill instead of going up and over.
In the near future, when the appearance of aging is decoupled from chronological aging, the things that will make people interesting and sexy might drift towards innocence, wit, wisdom, but to each their own. We certainly live in interesting times.
—–Postscript
When I was in Cannes in 2014, Sophia Loren made some depressing remarks about getting older. Read them in this blog:
