In February 1960, a film opened in Rome that would change the life of a thirty-five-year-old Italian actor, change the image of a city, and change the language of the whole world. It was called La Dolce Vita — the sweet life — and its star was Marcello Mastroianni, a shy, soft-spoken man from Fontana Liri who had spent a decade as a respected stage and screen actor without ever becoming famous outside Italy. Within a year, his face was known on every continent, and a single image — a blonde woman wading through the Trevi Fountain at dawn, with Mastroianni following her into the water — had become one of the most famous pictures in the history of cinema. Nothing in his life was ever the same again.
Rome Before the Sweet Life
To understand what La Dolce Vita did, you have to understand the Rome it was made in. Fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, the city was booming. Cinecittà, the great studio complex on the edge of Rome, was turning out films at a furious pace, and the city had become a playground for the international rich — American movie stars, European aristocrats, producers, and hangers-on, all of them drawn to the cafés of the Via Veneto, the street of hotels and nightclubs where the beautiful people gathered after dark. Rome in the late 1950s was the most glamorous city on earth, and it was also, as Fellini saw it, a little hollow: a place of parties that lasted until dawn and left everyone lonelier than before.
Fellini had been watching the Via Veneto scene for years, noting the photographers who stalked the celebrities, the journalists who traded in gossip, and the wealthy idlers who drifted from one party to the next. He wanted to make a film about that world — not a celebration of it, and not quite a condemnation, but a portrait of a society that had everything except a reason to be happy. He needed an actor who could walk through that world without belonging to it, a man who could be charmed by the sweet life and quietly disgusted by it at the same time. He needed Marcello Mastroianni.
The Man Who Was Almost Not Marcello
It is one of the great ironies of film history that Mastroianni almost did not get the part. The film’s producer, Dino De Laurentiis, had wanted Paul Newman to play Marcello Rubini, the gossip journalist at the centre of the story, and an American star would have made the film an easier sell abroad. But Fellini insisted on his own man. He had seen Mastroianni on stage and on screen, and he knew that what the role needed was not a movie star’s glamour but an ordinary man’s face — a face that could register pleasure and boredom, desire and disappointment, often in the same shot. Mastroianni was thirty-five, handsome in a rumpled, approachable way, and he had the quality Fellini prized above all others: he could listen. He could stand in a crowded room and seem, somehow, alone with his thoughts.
Mastroianni had made his breakthrough two years earlier in the caper comedy Big Deal on Madonna Street, and he was a respected actor in Italy, but he was not a star. He took the role of Marcello Rubini as he took every role: as a job to be done well, with craft and without fuss. Filming began in March 1959 and lasted about five months, most of it at Cinecittà, where the production designer Piero Gherardi built more than eighty sets, including a full-scale replica of the Via Veneto. Mastroianni was in nearly every scene, drifting through seven days and nights of parties, assignations, and dawns that arrived too soon.
Seven Days and Nights
The film follows Marcello Rubini, a journalist who writes for gossip magazines, over the course of a week in Rome. He chases celebrities, covers scandals, and dreams — half-heartedly — of becoming a serious writer, but the nights keep swallowing him. He spends an evening with Maddalena, a restless heiress; he is enchanted by Sylvia, a visiting American movie star; he watches his friend Steiner, a cultivated intellectual, slide toward tragedy; and he meets his father, a travelling salesman who arrives in Rome for a night of fun and leaves the next morning, exhausted and a little ashamed. Each episode is a variation on the same theme: a man looking for meaning in a world that offers only pleasure.
Mastroianni’s performance is the thread that holds it all together. He does not dominate the film the way a conventional leading man would. Instead, he watches — Sylvia dance, Steiner’s children play, his father trying to recapture his youth in a nightclub — and in his watching we see the whole film’s meaning: a man beginning to understand that he is wasting his life, and not knowing how to stop. It was a new kind of screen hero, not a man of action but a man of attention, and it suited Mastroianni perfectly. He had always been a watcher, a listener, a man who stood slightly apart from the room. Now Fellini had made that quality the centre of a masterpiece.
The Night at the Trevi Fountain
Every great film has a scene that outlives it, and La Dolce Vita has one of the most famous in all of cinema. Late in the film, after a long night of dancing at the Baths of Caracalla, Marcello and Sylvia find themselves alone in the streets of Rome, and she leads him to the Trevi Fountain. She steps into the water in her evening dress, beckoning him, and he follows her in, wading through the cold water as dawn breaks over the city. It is a moment of pure, reckless romance, and also of absurdity: a grown man in a suit, standing in a fountain at five in the morning, because a beautiful woman asked him to.
The scene was shot over a week in the winter, in bitterly cold water. According to Fellini, Anita Ekberg stood in the fountain for hours in her dress without complaint, while Mastroianni had to wear a wetsuit beneath his clothes — and even that did not save him from the cold. He is said to have drunk a whole bottle of vodka to get through it. None of that shows on screen. What shows is a man who has forgotten himself for a moment, caught up in a dream that will dissolve with the dawn, when Sylvia playfully pours fountain water over his head and the spell breaks. It is the image that has defined Mastroianni ever since: the man in the fountain, half in love, half lost, with Rome all around him.
The Scandal and the Palme d’Or
When La Dolce Vita was released in Italy in February 1960, it caused a sensation. The film was denounced from pulpits and condemned by the Vatican’s newspaper, and there were calls to ban it; audiences flocked to see what the fuss was about, and the film became a huge commercial success. Then, in May 1960, it won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and it went on to receive four Academy Award nominations, winning the Oscar for Best Costume Design. The sweet life had become a worldwide phenomenon, and the phrase itself — la dolce vita — entered the language as a description of a life of glamorous, idle pleasure.
For Mastroianni, the triumph was overwhelming. He had gone from being a respected Italian actor to being an international star in a matter of months, and the world now expected him to be Marcello Rubini forever: the charming man in the dinner jacket, drifting through Rome’s nights with beautiful women. The film made him the face of a new Italy — modern, elegant, ironic, and a little sad. He was thirty-five years old, and he had just played the role that would define him for the rest of his life, whether he wanted it to or not.
The Word That Entered the Language
La Dolce Vita gave the world more than a star and a phrase. It also gave the world a word. Marcello Rubini’s colleague, the news photographer who follows him through the nights of Rome, is called Paparazzo, and the name — borrowed by Fellini from a character in a novel — became the origin of “paparazzi”, the word for the photographers who stalk celebrities. It is a fitting legacy for a film about the business of fame: the movie that made Mastroianni famous also named the industry that would chase him, and every other famous person, for the rest of the century.
The word caught on because the film had caught something real. Fellini had understood, before almost anyone else, that celebrity was becoming an industry, and that the people who fed it were as much a part of the story as the stars themselves. Mastroianni’s Marcello is not a villain; he is a decent man doing a slightly shabby job, and the film’s sympathy for him is part of its genius. It never judges him, and it never quite forgives him either.
Overnight, a World Star
The success of La Dolce Vita transformed Mastroianni’s career overnight. Suddenly he was in demand everywhere: in France, in Britain, in America, and at home in Italy, where every director wanted to work with the man who had embodied Fellini’s Rome. He made Divorce Italian Style the following year, and won the first Academy Award nomination ever given for a performance in a language other than English. He made La Notte with Michelangelo Antonioni. He began his great partnership with Sophia Loren. And he did it all while remaining, stubbornly, an Italian actor: he largely shunned Hollywood, refused to become a Latin lover for American audiences, and kept working in the European cinema he loved.
It was an extraordinary rise, and it came at a price. For the rest of his life, Mastroianni would be introduced as the star of La Dolce Vita, and the role of Marcello Rubini would follow him like a shadow. He never resented it — he was too gracious, and too fond of Fellini, for that — but he knew what it meant. He had played a man who could not decide what to do with his life, and in doing so he had decided his own: he would be the face of Italian cinema for the next three decades.
The Shadow of the Sweet Life
Fellini knew what he had done to his friend, and three years later he offered him a way forward. In 8½, Mastroianni played Guido Anselmi, a blocked film director who is, in all but name, Fellini himself, and the performance is one of the greatest in the history of cinema. It was a different kind of role: not a man drifting through parties but a man trapped inside his own head, and it proved that Mastroianni was far more than the charming journalist of La Dolce Vita. The two films together — the sweet life and the creative crisis — are the twin peaks of his career.
Mastroianni would work with Fellini again, in City of Women and Ginger and Fred, but nothing ever quite matched the shock of La Dolce Vita. It was the film that made him a star, and also the film that made him a symbol — of Rome, of Italy, of a whole era of glamour and disillusion. When he died in 1996, the Trevi Fountain was draped in black, and the world remembered the night he waded into the water after Anita Ekberg. That is the power of the film that changed everything: it gave a shy actor from Fontana Liri a moment that would outlive him, and it gave the world an image of the sweet life that will never fade.