Erland Josephson

Born on June 15, 1923 in the Swedish capital, into a family closely linked to the cultural field, since among his ancestors he had a composer, a painter and a theater director. Ingmar Bergman came to go to the bookstore that his father owned in his adolescence.

After starting out as an actor in the theater from a very young age, at the end of the 30s it was precisely Bergman who became his mentor after directing him in some plays in Helsinborg and Gothenburg, with whom he began a friendship that would last throughout the years.

He made his debut with the filmmaker appearing briefly as a cashier in It rains on our love , and later in Eva (1948) -with a script by Bergman- and La alegría . He had a little more paper inThe face , where he played a consul, and in The Hour of the Wolf, where he was a baron. He played his first really important character with Bergman in Passion , where he was a man married to Bibi Anderson’s character, who brought a little out of his withdrawal to the protagonist (Max von Sydow), a guy who had withdrawn from the world by seclusion on an island .

More than satisfied with the results, Bergman would turn to him again – in the 70s more and more – to play the doctor in Cries and Whispers and turned him into a kind of alter ego on the screen in one of the most important jobs. Remembered the actor, the unfaithful husband of the six-episode miniseries Secretos de un matrimonio. When Bergman left his position as director of the prestigious Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm, he appointed him his successor. He held the post until 1975. He was also a co-writer with Bergman -under the pseudonym Bunel Eriksson- of Those Women! and Lustgarden .

He appeared briefly in the filmmaker’s television adaptation of The Magic Flute , and was also the doctor helping Liv Ullmann in Face to Face (1976) . In Autumn Sonata his appearance as an architect is of minor importance.

Focused for most of his professional career on the theater, Josephson began working abroad in the 1970s, after his successes with Bergman. Liliana Cavani turned him into Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil , he was an ambassador in The Unbearable Lightness of Being , by Philip Kaufman, a doctor in Hanussen the Fortune Teller, by István Szabó, and a courtier in The Books of Prospero , by Peter Greenaway.

But the non-Swedish filmmaker who got the most out of him was undoubtedly the Russian Andrei Tarkovsky, who recruited him for the first time in 1983 to give life to Nostalgia.the apocalyptic madman Domenico, whom the protagonists meet in a hotel. When Tarkovsky was very ill, on the verge of death, he gave him one of his best works, if not his best, the playwright willing to sacrifice everything he possesses to God, to stop the impending war, in Sacrifice .

In 1980 Erland Josephson directed and starred in Marmalade Revolution , which entered the Berlin Film Festival. He remained active until a very old age, for example, he played the curator of a museum in The Gaze of Ulysses , by Theo Angelopoulos, he was the diplomat Franz von Papen in The Holy Father John XXIII , and he was the man who sent the Niels Arestrup’s character, in Appointment with Venus, again under the baton of Szabó.

Bergman also continued to rely on him in many of his stage productions, and in his later screen work. Again with him he was the Jewish friend of the family who was the protagonist in Fanny and Alexander , and in the cinematographic farewell to the teacher, Saraband, recovered the musician Johan, from Secretos de un matrimonio , where he had divorced the character of Liv Ullmann. This actress turned Josephson into Bergman, in Unfaithful (2000) , directed by Ullmann herself from a script by the filmmaker, also her ex-husband.

Erland Josepson’s last work was Wellkâmm to Verona, by Suzane Osten, from 2006, but then had to withdraw due to illness. He is survived by five children, and Ulla Aberg, his wife. He was previously paired with actresses Kristina Adolphson and Barbro Larsson.