fellini's
women

Federico Fellini's 8½ is on many a movie fan's Top 10 list. And so, naturally, it had to be remade—first as a Broadway musical and now as the all-singing, all-dancing Hollywood blockbuster Nine, due out this month. Like the original, the new flick tells the story of a harried filmmaker's retreat into memory and fantasy as he juggles the competing demands of the women in his life.

Fellini himself was a great director of women, and the harem he brought to the screen in 8½, La Dolce Vita, La Strada, and other classic films runs the gamut of types, from aristocratic (Anouk Aimée) to angelic (Claudia Cardinale) to all-out va-va-voom (Anita Ekberg). His original muse, meanwhile, the gamine Giulietta Masina, wound up becoming his wife, and whatever the charms of the many actresses who passed before Fellini's lens, it was Masina's face he returned to in film after film.

—Maya Singer