Celebrity Biographies
Harriet Anderson
One of the most versatile members of Ingmar Bergman’s stable company, who wrote for her the leading role in the film that made her known, “A Summer with Monica”, and recovered her for “Cries and Whispers”, one of the top of his cinema. Harriet Andersson represented the image of the most modern Swedish woman of her time, but she emerged gracefully from the most varied roles of hers.
Born on Valentine’s Day, 1932, in the capital of the Swedish country, at the age of 15 she enrolled in the Calle Flygare acting school. She then participates in various classic productions at the Malmö municipal theater, some under the orders of Ingmar Bergman , who used to put on a couple of them each season. Impressed by her talent, the filmmaker turned her into the rebellious and troubled teenager in A Summer with Monica , who after an argument with her father leaves home to spend a few weeks sailing on a boat with her boyfriend. It was one of the director’s first international successes.
Curiously, in the magazines of the moment it appeared that he had discovered the actress when she worked as an elevator operator. “Really? This is new for me, I was already acting long before I met him, and we saw each other for the first time in the theater”, he commented in an interview in 2008. Despite the fact that at that time he had a relationship with the actor Per Oscarsson , during the filming A passionate romance with Bergman arose, despite the fact that he had just married the journalist Gun Hagberg, with whom he had a son, Lill-Ingmar. They both moved into the small bachelor apartment that the director had in Österlmam, the Stockholm neighborhood, very close to Gun’s with the baby.
However, in her memoir, “Harriet Andersson. Conversation with Jan Lumholdt ”, she reveals to the journalist to whom her title alludes that it was a horrible stage for her. She describes Bergman as a “horrible, pathologically jealous guy at times.” Despite the fact that her idyll ended fatally, he continued to count on her, for various plays, and several of her best-known feature films. She was an Amazon in Circus Night (1953), a cold girl in A Love Lesson (1954), a model in Dreams (1955), the maid in Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), and the schizophrenic Como in a mirror(1961). “I never thought of him as a world-renowned genius. In fact, in Sweden they didn’t treat him like that, he wasn’t as famous as in any other country. I think he was a little sad about that.”
After separating from Bergman, she married acting outsider Bertil Wejfeldt in 1959, but divorced three years later, after giving birth to Petra Wejfeldt, their only daughter. The girl was called the same as the character of her mother in the aforementioned Smiles of a summer night .
Paired with another director, Jorn Donner, she participated in his films A Sunday in September (1963), Amar (1964), The Adventure Begins Here (1965), and Anna (1969). In Hollywood, she shoots Call for a Dead Man , an adaptation of the novel by John le Carré, directed by Sidney Lumet, where she plays the wife of the early-retired secret agent played by James Mason. In the Spanish-Swedish co-production La sabina , by José Luis Borau , she plays the wife of an English writer exiled in Spain.
After a decade without working with her, Ingmar Bergman brings her back for Cries and Whispers , one of her most appreciated dramas, where she plays Agnes, who in the 19th century is about to die of uterine cancer, accompanied by her two sisters and a servant. In the tape she does what is perhaps her best work, with a terrible scene, in which her character suddenly stops being alive, while she hugs Liv Ullmann . “I was inspired by the death of my father, he is the only person I have seen die. She started to gasp and pant a lot, and then there was silence, so she knew she was dead. That’s how I realized that life leaves you in a very short time.”
He would remember her again for his penultimate film, Fanny and Alexander , where he played Justina, a maid who rats on the children because they have told her that ghosts visit them, a story that will cost them harsh corporal punishment. In the last stage of her career, she works mostly on television. The Danish Lars Von Trier recruited her for Dogville , where she plays one of the residents of the town where Nicole Kidman ‘s character takes refuge . Harriet Andersson retired after The Murders of Fjällbacka: The Sea Gives, the Sea Takes , a 2003 thriller telefilm.
Despite the surname, he has no family relationship with Bibi Andersson , another of Bergman’s usual faces, in titles such as The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries .