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the players
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bibi andersson
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harriet andersson
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g. bj�rnstrand
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ingrid thulin
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liv ullmann
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max von sydow
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The Magic Works of Ingmar Bergman is now located at www.bergmanorama.com. Please update your bookmarks. Thank you for visiting!
 BIBI ANDERSSON
Following her theatre training which included study at the Royal Dramatic Theatre School from 1954-56, and a series of bit parts in films, Andersson made her first memorable screen appearance in a small role in
Smiles of a Summer Night, thereby joining the wonderful company of actors who played in Bergman's films of the 1950s and 1960s. Following her role in
The Seventh Seal, as the wife in the pair of fairground innocents who survive the destruction of the knight and his family after the apocalypse, she played the hitchhiker in
Wild Strawberries, again projecting a youthful hopefulness and innocence. Her portrayal of the unmarried mother in
Brink of Life revealed a broader range and won her an award at Cannes (along with
Ingrid Thulin and Eva Dahlbeck for the same film).
With the exception of a role in All These Women, Andersson did not work with Bergman for six years. Their collaboration resumed with her most important film,
Persona, in which she established herself as an actress of international stature. This masterpiece owes much to Andersson's brilliance and is evidence of her greater emotional experience than was apparent in her earlier work. The film required of Andersson an enormous extension of her talent; her submission to the film's somewhat cruel objectivity attested to Andersson's dedication�not only to the aims of Bergman's films but also to the demands made by a role of extraordinary emotional complexity. The characterization did much to erase the rather condescending view of her as a pleasant, lightweight actress, and elevated her to the first rank of Bergman's ensemble, along with
Thulin and Ullmann.
Andersson then made a number of films with other Swedish directors, and worked again with Bergman in a supporting part in
The Passion of Anna, in a central role opposite Elliott Gould in
The Touch, and in a brief appearance in one episode of
Scenes from a Marriage, which would be the last films they made together. Like
Ullmann and Thulin she has also appeared in a number of international films, usually wasting her talent.
� International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers
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| Born: |
Berit Elisabeth Andersson, 11 November 1935, in Stockholm, Sweden. |
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| Education: |
Terserus Drama School; Royal Dramatic Theatre School, Stockholm, 1954-56; attended theatre school in Malm�. |
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| Family: |
 Married Kjell Grede, 1960 (divorced 1973); daughter Jenny Mathilda.
Married Per Ahlmark, 1978 (divorced).
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| Career: |
1949: began working as an extra in films.
1951: appeared in a Bris soap commercial directed by Bergman.
1955: appeared in
Smiles of a Summer Night, her first film with Bergman.
1973: American stage debut in Erich Maria Remarque's Full Circle.
1990: debut as stage director, Stockholm.
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| BERGMAN FILMS |
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| Bibi Andersson has appeared in the following Bergman-directed films: |
| COMMENTARY |
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"Bibi Andersson is a close friend of mine�a lovely and extremely talented actress. She is totally oriented toward reality, always needing motives for what she does....An actress can do something unsuited to her and make it believable, but Bibi Andersson is so integrated a person that, for her, it is impossible to play something she doesn't believe in."
� Ingmar Bergman, 1971
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"For him [Bergman], I'm still a little girl."
� Bibi Andersson, 1976
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"It was the knowledge of a person that inspired him [Bergman] to write in a certain direction. Even if it was unconscious, I'm sure it was playing a big part. If he was at work on something and knew that one of his actress friends had a similar problem or attitude, he would use her. When I was reading a script, I tried to figure out what side of me he was trying to use now, or what he had seen, or what it was that he did not want. You can sometimes be very frustrated if you feel the part does not do you justice. When I read Persona I wasn't flattered. I didn't understand why I had to play this sort of insecure, weak personality when I was struggling so hard to be sure of myself and to cover up my insecurities. I realized that he was totally aware of my personality. I was better off just trying to deliver that. It's a good way to know oneself. Sometimes I think artists instinctively are very good psychiatrists. I also think all parts have to be based on oneself, otherwise they will never come across."
� Bibi Andersson, 1977
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"I don't feel anything for my work in those films [The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries]. I love the films, still. They are very vivid in my memory even if they're twenty years old. But I have no connection with what I was doing then. I saw
Wild Strawberries recently, and I thought I was terrible, terrible. But we were all rather corny in those days. There was a certain kind of acting that seemed different, or perhaps it had to do with the sound that came out different. I don't know. The voices sounded different then; I hear them as being artificial. Maybe that is why I feel a certain distance when I see those films. But it doesn't matter. I'm proud of the films, but not with regard to myself. Persona, on the other hand, I'm still proud of. Each time I see it, I know I accomplished what I set out to do as an actress, that I created a person."
� Bibi Andersson, 1977
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"Career implies that you are on a staircase and you have to take one step up. I want to dismiss the whole idea of career. I'm living my life, and I love to work."
� Bibi Andersson
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"You can say, 'I will not compromise because this is not what I want to do.' But then you will never have a chance to do what you want, because you will never be seen enough to get that opportunity. I have tried, to the best of my ability, to be as selective as I had the opportunity to be and yet not stop working because of moral reasons. I think I have a moral responsibility to myself as an actress, and that is that I have to work, because otherwise the instrument dries up."
� Bibi Andersson
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"Somehow I don't feel I'm acting if I try to imitate a way of talking that's not my own. I think the only way a foreign actor can work in America is if people will just accept the way that person speaks. But I also think American audiences want Americans. You're very lucky if you make it as a foreigner in films here. I notice American audiences don't like to read subtitles. Even a huge European success is a small success here compared to American films."
� Bibi Andersson
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"One of the most harrowing roles the screen has presented [is] Nurse Alma in Persona. That this masterpiece owed so much to Bibi Andersson was acknowledgement of her greater emotional experience. She was thirty now, and in that astonishing scene where
Liv Ullmann and she look into the camera as if it were a mirror, and
Ullmann arranges Andersson's hair, it is as if Bergman were saying: 'Look what time has done. Look what a creature this is.' Alma talks throughout
Persona but is never answered, so that her own insecurity and instability grow. Technically the part calls for domination of timing, speech, and movement that exposes the chasms in the soul. And it was in showing that breakdown, in reliving Alma's experience of the orgy on the beach years before, in deliberately leaving glass on the gravel, and in realizing with awe and panic that she is only another character for the supposedly sick actress, that Andersson herself seemed one of the most tormented women in cinema....The Touch shows that she is the warmest, most free-spirited of Bergman's women, more broadly compassionate than
Thulin or Ullmann. Being more robust, her distress is more moving, and her doggedness more encouraging."
� David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (2002)
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