Actress starred in Bergman classics but struggled to find success beyond Sweden
Bibi Andersson, who has died aged 83, was a Swedish actress whose portrayals of chaste schoolgirls, beguiling young women and tortured wives made her a muse and frequent collaborator of film-maker Ingmar Bergman, most notably in The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries and Persona.
Easily recognisable by her short blonde hair, button nose, slim figure and wide smile, Andersson appeared in more than 100 film and television productions, often playing luminous characters whose warm demeanour masked past traumas or intense self-doubt.
Although she starred in Hollywood movies such as I Never
Promised You a
Rose Garden in the 1970s, working with
American directors such as
John Huston (The Kremlin Letter) and Robert Altman (Quintet), she never attained the spectacular success she found in Sweden, where Jan Goransson, of the Swedish Film Institute, called her ‘‘one of the greatest stars we ever had’’.
Andersson was the only performer to receive four Guldbagge Awards (the Swedish equivalent of the Oscars) for acting, and was best known for her dozen films and additional theatrical productions with Bergman, whose explorations of lust, loneliness and existential dread made him one of the 20th century’s most acclaimed film-makers.
Bergman employed a stock company of actors that also included Liv Ullmann, and he began working with Andersson when she was 15, directing her in a soap commercial. In 1957, she starred in two of Bergman’s most celebrated movies: The Seventh Seal ,asan actress and young mother who encounters a disillusioned knight from the Crusades, and Wild Strawberries, as two different characters – both named Sara – who catch the eye of a grouchy physician.
About that time, Andersson also began a relationship with the director, who was then married to journalist and linguist Gun Grut. Andersson later told The New York Times that they were together for two years, during which she appeared in Bergman films such as Brink of Life (1958), for which she and co-stars Eva Dahlbeck, Ingrid Thulin and Barbro Hiort af Ornas shared the best actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
Her most acclaimed work, however, was Persona, Bergman’s 1966 study of identity, in which she played a loquacious nurse who cares for a troubled stage actress who has gone mute. Andersson co-starred with Ullmann, then a largely unknown 26-year-old. Bergman once said he cast them after watching them talk together in the street.
Both looked somewhat alike, and by the end of the film their identities blended together, with their faces at one point overlapping in one of Bergman’s most famous and mysterious shots. ‘‘It has this meaning of
how people can integrate into one another and how difficult it is to stay stable when you get very influenced,’’ Andersson later told the London magazine Time Out.
The movie marked the beginning of a long creative partnership between Bergman and Ullmann, who supplanted Andersson as the director’s leading female collaborator and had a daughter with Bergman.
Andersson was often asked about her relationship with Bergman, whom she described as ‘‘very tender and very nice’’ on set, and temperamental away from the camera.
‘I’m not as much a medium for him as Liv,’’ she told The Times in 1977. ‘‘It doesn’t bother me, until everyone asks me about it, asks how come. It’s important that I begin to rely on myself, especially because he and I aren’t so much alike.
‘‘When I was 20, I struggled very hard for independence, but I didn’t know enough to be independent without having this sense of competition with other women. I was around men who were too strong. Other women were, maybe, a threat. I have changed. I see how much we can help each other.’’
Andersson was born in Stockholm, and
was in acting school when she was discovered by Bergman, according to a 1993 account in the Los Angeles Times. He invited her to Malmo and cast her in his 1955 comedy Smiles of a Summer Night.
By the 1970s, however, she had come to view her critical success with Bergman as a mixed blessing. ‘‘It was complicated when I needed to make money, because I had too good a name – but not for being commercial,’’ she later told the Los Angeles Times. ‘‘People didn’t forgive me if I did inferior stuff.’’
Her marriages to Kjell Grede, a director, and Per Ahlmark, a politician and writer, ended in divorce. She had a daughter from her first marriage, and was married to Gabriel Mora Baeza.
She once told The Times that, before Persona, she had long sought to play meatier roles for Bergman, and resented being called ‘‘a professional innocent’’ in the Swedish media. But she never asked the director for a change in parts.
‘‘I was too proud. And later I realised that there weren’t that many young actresses who could project this light quality.
‘‘Later on, he once said to me: ‘I need a young you.’ I said: ‘What do you mean – a young me? You never told me I was anything.’ ’’ –