Actor of great depth and complexity known for her roles in the films of Ingmar Bergman

It is often the fate of any actor who worked regularly for the illustrious Swedish director Ingmar Bergman to be celebrated, above all, for that association. Among this elite ensemble, Bibi Andersson, who has died aged 83, appeared in 10 features and three television films by Bergman, which included such masterpieces as The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957) and Persona (1966).

With Persona, Andersson became internationally recognised as a performer capable of great depth and complexity. Playing Nurse Alma, taking care of Elizabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann), a famous actor stricken with psychosomatic loss of speech, at a remote seaside cottage, Andersson has to deliver most of the dialogue of the film. The spiritual anguish is written on the features of the two leads as they begin to understand one another and exchange identities.

Born in Stockholm, the daughter of Josef Andersson, a businessman, and Karin (nee Mansson), a social worker, Andersson first met Bergman while she was still at school, when she appeared in one of the soap commercials he made in the early 1950s. She played a princess who has to give a swineherd 100 kisses in return for a bar of soap.

While studying at the Royal Dramatic Theatre school in the Swedish capital, she began her screen career in 1953 in “fresh-faced girl” roles. At first, Bergman, for whom she had appeared for a few minutes on stage in the theatre scene in Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), used her carefree persona to play a strolling player, Mia, the devoted wife of the child-like juggler, in The Seventh Seal. Andersson brings beauty and sparkle into plague-ridden 14th-century Europe, serving wild strawberries (symbolising the coming of spring) to the errant knight (Max von Sydow).

In Wild Strawberries, she again projected youthful hope and innocence in a double role, the cousin of the aged professor (Victor Sjöström), whom he wished to marry (seen in flashback), but lost to his brother, and a happy hitchhiker who reminds him of his lost love.

Andersson, Ingrid Thulin and Eva Dahlbeck shared the best actress prize at the 1958 Cannes film festival for So Close to Life (aka Brink of Life) set in a maternity ward. Mothers-to-be or not to be is the question in Bergman’s clinical, pessimistic film, with Andersson again providing some light as an unmarried young woman who decides to keep her baby.

She did not have too much to do as a giggly servant girl in The Magician (aka The Face, 1958), but was central to Bergman’s metaphysical comedy The Devil’s Eye (1960) as Virtue, the virginal daughter of a country parson.

After she played one of a cellist’s harem of mistresses in Bergman’s strained comedy Now About These Women (aka All These Women, 1964), her mentor finally gave Andersson a role worthy of her talent as the talkative nurse in Persona.

“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,” Andersson told American Film magazine in 1977. “I realised that he [Bergman] 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.”

Persona was followed by A Passion (aka The Passion of Anna, 1969) in which she had her first chance to use her sexuality in a Bergman film as an unhappily married middle-class woman who seduces a reclusive man (Von Sydow) while visiting a remote island.

In The Touch (1971), Bergman’s first English-language film, Andersson is a married woman with two children, who has an affair with a visiting American archaeologist (Elliott Gould). Reviewing the film, Molly Haskell in the Village Voice wrote: “The evolution of Bibi Andersson under Bergman has been nothing short of marvellous: from simple, uncomplicated and shallow to simple, uncomplicated and deep. Her beautiful, once-blank face now mirrors the acquired wisdom of her generous soul, her mental health having become an asset. But if she is the simplest and least neurotic of Bergman’s women, she is also the strongest and most adult.”

The Touch was to be the last time she worked with Bergman on a film, apart from a small role in one episode of Scenes From a Marriage (1973), a six-part series made for television. However, they were later reunited in the theatre when he directed her in the Royal Dramatic theatre’s productions of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1993) and as Paulina in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale (1995), both performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Parallel to her long association with Bergman, Andersson had a busy and varied international career in films, television and on stage. Nevertheless, Bergman’s shadow hung over many of her Swedish films in the 60s.

He provided the screenplay for The Pleasure Garden (1961), directed by Alf Kjellin, a satire on small-town morality, with Andersson looking stunning in colour. Vilgot Sjöman, for whom she made two films, was a Bergman protege. They were The Mistress (1962), for which Andersson, as a woman in love with a man (Von Sydow) who refuses to leave his wife, won the best actress prize in Berlin, and My Sister My Love (1966), a bleak Bergmanesque study of incest. In Mai Zetterling’s The Girls (1968), a passionate feminist morality tale about actors analysing their attitudes to Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Andersson led a cast made up almost entirely of Bergman regulars.

Andersson was fluent in English and starred in several American movies, though as a somewhat homogenised version of herself, whether as a woman captured by the Apache people in the patchy western Duel at Diablo (1966) or a Russian spy in John Huston’s tepid cold war saga The Kremlin Letter (1970).

She was a sympathetic psychiatrist in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977), the long-suffering wife of Steve McQueen as Doctor Stockmann, behind a thick beard and glasses, in An Enemy of the People (1978), based on Arthur Miller’s version of the Ibsen drama, and a French hooker in The Concorde – Airport ’79 (1979). In Robert Altman’s enigmatic allegory Quintet (1979), Andersson, according to Pauline Kael, “does wonders in a monologue about a dream … for a moment, we have the illusion of being involved in the movie”.

In later years she became involved in peace and feminist issues, while continuing her work on stage and screen in Sweden, winning the last of her four Guldbagge awards (the Swedish equivalent to Baftas) for her role as the cruel abbess in Arn: The Knight Templar (2007). In 2009 she suffered a stroke.

Andersson is survived by her third husband, Gabriel Mora Baeza, whom she married in 2004, and a daughter, Jenny, from her first marriage, to Kjell Grede, which ended in divorce.

• Bibi Andersson (Berit Elisabeth Andersson), actor, born 11 November 1935; died 14 April 2019

Ronald Bergan
first published in:
www.theguardian.com/film/2019/apr/15/bibi-andersson-obituary