Zetterling, Mai (1925–1994)

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Zetterling, Mai (1925–1994)

Swedish stage and screen actress, film director and author who made her most important contribution to Swedish cinema as an advocate of women's rights and a critic of contemporary society. Born Mai Elisabeth Zetterling in Vasterås, Sweden, on May 24, 1925; died of cancer at her home in London, England, on March 15, 1994; daughter of Lina Zetterling; stepdaughter of Joel Zetterling; attended the Royal Dramatic Theater School in Stockholm, 1942–45; married Isaac Samuel "Tutte" Lemkow, in 1944 (divorced); married David Hughes, in 1958; children: (first marriage) two.

Acted in films in Sweden, England and America before settling in England; after a commendable career on stage and screen with major roles in plays by Shakespeare, Lorca, Sartre, Ibsen, Strindberg and Anouilh, turned director and made documentaries for BBC before moving on to feature films.

Filmography as actress:

Lasse-Maja (Sw., 1941); Hets (Torment or Frenzy, Sw., 1944); Iris and the Lieutenant (Sw., 1946); Sunshine Follows Rain (Sw., 1946); Night Is My Future (Sw., 1948); Frieda (UK, 1947); Quartet (UK, 1948); A Portrait from Life (The Girl in the Painting, UK, 1948); The Lost People (UK, 1949); The Bad Lord Byron (UK, 1949); The Tall Headlines (The Frightened Bride, UK, 1952); Desperate Moment (UK, 1953); Knock on Wood (US, 1954); A Prize of Gold (UK, 1955); Seven Waves Away (UK, 1956); Married Life (UK, 1957); Of Love and Lust ("A Doll's House" episode; Sw. 1957); The Truth About Women (UK, 1958); Jet Storm (UK, 1959); Offbeat (UK, 1961); Only Two Can Play (UK, 1961); The Main Attraction (UK, 1963); The Vine Bridge (Sw., 1965); Hidden Agenda (UK, 1990); The Witches (UK, 1990).

Filmography as director:

The Polite Invasion (documentary, 1960); Lords of Little Egypt (documentary, 1961); The Prosperity Race (documentary, 1963); The Do-It-Yourself-Democracy (documentary, 1963); The War Game (UK, short, 1963); (and co-screenwriter) Loving Couples (Sw., feature, 1964); (and co-screenwriter from her novel) Night Games (Sw., feature, 1966); (and co-screenwriter) Doktor Glas (Denmark, feature, 1968); (and co-screenwriter) The Girls (UK, feature, 1968); (and co-screenwriter) Vincent the Dutchman (short, 1972); Visions of Eight (Munich Olympics documentary; "The Strongest" episode, 1973); Of Seals and Man (UK, short, 1978); (and screenwriter) We Have Many Faces (UK, feature, 1975); (and screenwriter) Love (UK, feature, 1981); (and screenwriter) Scrubbers (UK, feature, 1983); (and screenwriter and story editor) Amorosa (feature, 1986).

Selected writings:

Night Games, Shadow of the Sun, Birds of Passage, The Cat's Tale, All Those Tomorrows.

Mai Zetterling, born in Vasterås, Sweden, in 1925, had been conceived during a summer romance and would not meet her biological father until years later, when she was a grown woman and well-known actress. Her mother Lina married Joel Zetterling, her father's best friend, and took her small daughter to join him in Australia. There Joel was attempting to get work as a maker of top hats, but the economy was too depressed for ready success in such a trade. The change in climate proved to be devastating to Lina Zetterling . For the several months she spent in a hospital, her child was farmed out with strangers, leaving Mai with a "gnawing, longing pain" for something or someone that was to last for years. A pensive child, she was given to dreaming her days away in their garden, in a tent made of old mats; during the rainy season, she would sit at the window making up a world more interesting to her than the one she inhabited.

At age seven, she returned with her mother to Sweden and moved in with her grandparents in Eskilstuna. Unable to speak Swedish, she hit upon the "magic powers of art" when she found that people would reward her with chocolates for singing songs; out of this grew a lifelong tendency to transform deficiency into accomplishment. While she was close to her grandfather, her mother often seemed like a stranger, giving off an acrid bitterness of lost opportunities. She had two aunts, whom she named Aunt Good and Aunt Bad; the former was said to be mad. Aunt Good talked about ghosts and spirits as if they were alive and real, imparting an interest in the supernatural to the child; she also taught Mai that everyone had an associated color and encouraged her to work hard at finding her own, an attractive notion to the intelligent, precocious child. Aunt Bad, meanwhile, tried to drive home the idea that everyone was untrustworthy and vengeful.

Rejoined by her stepfather, Mai and her mother moved to Stockholm. Living in the poorest part of the city, the family moved from one location to another, exposed to dreary poverty and despairing sights. Although nearly illiterate, Mai found escape in writing poetry. By age ten, she had a collection of writings titled "My Fleeting Youth." Lonely, restless, self-willed, and endlessly sad, Zetterling grew increasingly alienated. She moved from school to school, remaining at the bottom of her class, unable to gain enough selfconfidence from the occasional sympathetic teacher to escape her circumstances. In a slum environment where incest, fraud, and thieving were common, and sex was a substitute for love, she mirrored her dispirited circumstances by habitually cheating and stealing. She lost her virginity at a seedy campsite outside the city which was "infested with ticks and mosquitoes."

To escape her feeling of deadness, the young Zetterling had her hair curled to emulate the American child actress Shirley Temple (Black) . When a permanent failed to produce the bouncy and cheerful change she desired, Zetterling came to hate the image of the child star. But, out of this incident, she realized that the possibilities for transformation did exist inside her.

At age 14, she left school to take a job in a textile factory. After removing the tacking threads from men's suits from eight-to-five, she spent her nights joining hordes of other impoverished working girls in seedy dance halls and sordid rooms. Fed up, she left the factory for a job in a haberdashery, where she dusted buttons and ran errands until the brother of the proprietress attempted to rape her. Jobs followed at a pawnshop and a drugstore. Finally, an elderly man who ran a mail-order business from his home hired her to write letters. He also allowed her to read his books. Reaching beyond dimestore novels for the first time in her life, Zetterling read Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, and Maupassant, while sitting in a special chair of her employer, with her shoes and stockings removed. Since the prurient interest of her boss was limited to viewing her, the teenage Zetterling considered it within acceptable bounds.

After an attempt to improve herself failed when she tried going back to school to qualify for a job as a shop assistant, a measure of success came her way when she joined a children's theater

club. Unaware of the vast experience Zetterling already had to draw on, a reviewer marveled at the 16-year-old girl, in the role of a witch, so adept at acting "like a hundred-year-old."

A chance conversation overheard on a tram led to her audition for the part of a young girl in a play by Par Lagerkvist, a leading novelist and dramatist in Sweden. Although she had never before set foot in an actual theater, she outperformed the 14 other girls who tried out for the role and was cast opposite one of Sweden's leading actors, with a contract paying $125 a month.

During the play's run, Zetterling met Calle Flygare, who invited her to join his acting school. As one of four fortunate girls attending his classes three evenings a week, tuition free, she found herself in an environment like none she had ever known. In the security of Flygare's generosity and affection, Zetterling was no longer a prisoner of her past. Filled with energy and inspiration, she looked inward, and her dormant powers began to surface.

Mai Zetterling">
If I cannot be a sailor, I will be an explorer.
—Mai Zetterling

She applied to Sweden's National Theater School and was accepted, with a stipend, as the youngest actor. At 17, faced with learning deportment, dancing, and voice technique, she felt stupid and uneducated, but it soon became clear that she could communicate on stage. In her second year, Zetterling was cast in a lead role in Maxwell Anderson's The Eve of St. Mark. As she moved to larger roles in works by Shakespeare, Sartre, Lorca and Strindberg, she was fortunate in having Alf Sjoberg as her second mentor. His dynamic personality overcame her protective shell and helped to release her talent.

Graduating from the National Theater School at 19, Zetterling scored a resounding success in Shadow and Substance opposite the famous Lars Hanson. After meeting Isaac Samuel Lemkow, a classical dancer nicknamed Tutte, she began to receive the affection she had always craved. Tutte, who had lost his mother and sister as they crossed into Sweden while fleeing Nazi-occupied Norway, matched Mai in his need for love. They married and one year later had a daughter.

But when Zetterling prospered as an actress, Tutte felt left behind. In 1945, she moved with husband, child and nurse to London, where she had the lead in the movie Frieda. Like many Swedes, she was perceived at first as stiff and formal, but she worked hard and was impressive in front of the camera. Producers found bit parts for Tutte in her movies, but his self-confidence took a beating when he could not make a life for himself as a dancer. In his frustration, he often made Zetterling feel guilty and increasingly intimidated.

Publicists, meanwhile, found the young actress naive. Relying on neither hairdressers nor makeup, and speaking candidly when she was approached, she had none of the star quality that characterized movie icons of the 1940s and 1950s. In Frieda, however, she was well received. Her fragile vulnerability on screen was suited to her role—that of a young war bride whose presence in English society raises questions of how to treat Germans after the war—and her portrayal won outstanding reviews.

When an invitation came from Ingmar Bergman to play in Music in the Dark, Zetterling was drawn into the role of lover both on and off screen. Simultaneously attracted and repelled by the great director, she understood that Bergman's method was to get the most out of his actors by knowing them inside out. Cast as a woman who comes to the rescue of a despairing man who has gone blind, she was only marginally satisfied with her performance. Zetterling was less pleased with Bergman's ability to bring out her talent than she had been with Sjoberg, and the collaboration went no further.

Her success in film notwithstanding, Zetterling felt the theater was her true home, at a time when the film industry was still looked upon with some disparagement. When a second pregnancy prevented her from returning to England to star in Saraband for Dead Lovers, she was patient. She also viewed the birth of her son as a peace offering to Tutte, who thought another child might bring them closer. But the role of mother was never one she would consider to be primary. Two months later, Zetterling was back in the theater, starring in Sartre's Electra, when she fainted on stage during the opening-night performance.

At age 23—while the mother of two was coping with the chronic strain of Tutte's depression at being cast as Mr. Zetterling—she decided to return to London rather than become a staple at Sweden's National Theater. In England, she signed a seven-year contract with the Rank Organization, which gave her the steady income needed for the household but lost her the right to choose her roles. Starring for awhile in second-rate movies, she was saved emotionally and professionally when she appeared on stage in the role of Hedvig in Ibsen's The Wild Duck; the production at St. Martin's Theater ran for an entire year. She was also released by Rank to play Nina in The Seagull and a role Jean Anouilh's Point of Departure. As the consensus grew that players at Rank were being wasted, they were offered the choice of breaking their contracts or continuing at vastly reduced salaries. Zetterling chose the former. A year later, in 1951, she signed another contract to cover her expenses, this time with a freelance producer.

To keep her house and family afloat, Zetterling took roles, modeled clothes and presented prizes, becoming a part of the star system she had once fought to avoid. Her new approach was helped by Herbert Lom, her co-star in her second film under the new contract; in love with Lom, Zetterling was willing to follow his lead. The inevitable trip to Hollywood came about after Zetterling was signed to star with Danny Kaye in Knock on Wood, and Paramount decided to move production of the film from Britain to Hollywood. Ill at ease in Tinseltown, Zetterling did not understand the movie capital's jargon or jokes and did not appreciate its treatment of stars as either monsters or heroes, gods and goddesses. She was "ill suited," in her words, to play "the cutie pie, the piece of ass." Behind the glitz, she saw "desperate people inside those blown-up heroines, searching for their own identity, becoming more vain and at the same time more insecure, suspicious of all the people surrounding them, accosting their privacy." For good or bad, her Hollywood career ended when she declined a starring role opposite Gregory Peck.

Divorced by this time, with her children in boarding schools, Zetterling returned to London to play Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House. The role proved to be an eye-opener. She recognized in Nora games she'd been playing, having plied similar tricks to gain Lom as her lover, while knowing he would never leave his family for her. Zetterling was assailed by guilt over her inadequacies as a mother, feelings which resonated in Nora's question as to how she could educate her children when she had not educated herself. Though she had tried giving her children all she had missed materialistically in her own childhood, Zetterling still felt unable to offer them emotional ballast, and her daughter's rejection in later years was to cause her great pain.

Selected as Tyrone Power's costar in Seven Waves Away, Zetterling began a much-publicized love affair with him that lasted almost three years. By its end, she had met David Hughes, a young English writer, who had just finished his first novel. The two felt an instant attraction, and Zetterling soon proposed marriage. The wedding took place in Oxford in April 1958, and the couple bought a house in Berry Grove, Hampshire. For almost 15 years, at least intermittently, it framed the "family" life—of husband, wife, and children—that Mai had always wanted.

Meanwhile, Zetterling felt creative limitations to acting and found a new medium to explore her own ideas by directing documentary films. Her first venture, The Polite Invasion, was released in 1960. The film described the ancient nomadic ways of the Scandinavian Lapps, who lived in harmony with nature and with strong beliefs in magic. Arguing for the preservation of a culture in danger of extinction, the film also demonstrated that Lapps who had not kept up with Sweden's social developments were being shortchanged by the welfare state.

The following year, in 1961, Zetterling received £2,000 from the British Broadcasting Company to make a film about gypsies (Roma). As in Invasion, she was to appear and narrate for no extra fee; in fact, with the exception of the sound, handled by her husband David, and one cinematographer, Zetterling did everything. Together, wife and husband were to make four documentaries and a short feature film, The War Game, which won Best Short Film Prize at the 1963 Venice Festival. Zetterling drove herself hard and carried her husband along. To alleviate their chronic shortage of money, Hughes also worked as a freelance journalist, although this work took him away from the writing he preferred to do.

After The War Game, a Lux commercial brought Zetterling to Sweden, where she began her research for a full-length feature film she wanted to produce. Loving Couples drew a mixed response, praised by one reviewer as "One of the most ambitious debuts since Citizen Kane," while another deemed it "une chronique scandaleuse." As a filmmaker, Zetterling was labeled "tough." This first feature—based on the eight-volume family saga by Agnes von Krusenstjerna , known as the "Swedish Proust"—explores women's attitudes toward the fundamentals of life—birth, marriage, sexual relations, and individual freedom—and dramatized how they differed from men's. Consistent with the author's theme that natural loneliness is the tragedy of women, and a fate which only having a child could assuage, the film holds that the rough texture of manliness is necessary in the fabric of a woman's life, but that a man is not enough.

Later films did not elude controversy. Based on her own novel, Zetterling's Night Games (released in 1966) depicts the decadence of modern Europe as revealed through perversion. While a review in The Times called the film "[a] lure to prurient and sensation seekers," it continued, "but since it is also a film of quality and of taste, wider box office horizons may be open to the picture than the mere exploitation belt which girds the globe." In a story depicting modern man as corrupted from childhood, the protagonist seeks rebirth through reliving his past, then burns to the ground the old manor where he grew up. "I tried to film a story of modern Europe," Zetterling remarked in her program notes written for the Venice Film Festival. "I try to be honest, so it shows signs of decadence. Perverted sex is one of those signs, perhaps the most dramatically obvious, and I use it because I believe you can only come to a positive view of things by passing through innumerable negative views."

With Hughes, Zetterling also collaborated on a version of Lysistrata. This remained unedited until she had done a film she was invited to make, Doktor Glas, which was based on a novel by Hjalmar Soderberg. This picture, selected for the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, was halted by the French student revolt of that year, and it had only a short run in New York. Nor did her Lysistrata, released as The Girls, become an immediate success. Swedish audiences panned it, failing to understand the ironic nature of the plot. There was no immediate comfort in the then-unknown fact that the film would become an international success six years later, partly due to women's film festivals held around the world. At that time, Simone de Beauvoir would praise the "multiple dimensions" of its images and its reflections on "real" life, writing in Le Monde: "Ironic and comic, this film moves us by the beauty of its landscapes, its poetry and above all its subtle tenderness."

In the interim, however, Zetterling suffered a period of devastation. Feeling a complete failure, she was disturbed by having brought Hughes to the point where he had run out of things he cared to write about. At the same time, her childhood became the material for a new creative endeavor, a collection of short stories with the common theme of incest, titled Shadow of the Sun.

When her book was accepted for publication, Zetterling turned to making a film about Vincent van Gogh, producing and directing what became a one-hour TV presentation for the BBC. Her marriage to David Hughes was nearing its end. The couple had sold their house in England and bought an old stone house in France, "Living Waters," which reflected Zetterling's desires and tastes rather than those of her husband. While she was revitalized by laboring with her vegetable patch, goats, and herb garden, Hughes missed his native London. A visit by his parents became the catalyst for change, and he returned with them to England.

Zetterling was left on the verge of a nervous breakdown, accusing herself of hoarding the spotlight, relegating David to the wings, and wondering if she had left the man she loved "weaker, emasculated and uncreative." She found her cure in work, transforming her grief through the writing of a new book, Birds of Passage.

With the eventual success of The Girls came offers from around the world for more films, including documentaries and children's features. Zetterling was in Greenland making a film on Eskimo (Inuit) seal hunters when she and the young Frenchman working as her assistant on camera and sound found a shared love of adventure and the out of doors. He was 28 years her junior, and the two were steady companions when the 53-year-old Zetterling invited him to live with her in the old French farmhouse she had purchased after selling Living Waters.

From England, Zetterling received an offer to do a feature film on young female offenders held in Borstal Prison. Presented once again with an opportunity to scrutinize and examine social standards, she viewed hundreds of women passing before her video camera, from whom she chose 30 for Scrubbers. The film played to full houses and by 1983 had been shown in 14 countries. The following year, Zetterling, approaching 60, was at work on her next film, Amorosa, based on the life of Agnes von Krusenstjerna.

Zetterling once called herself a "Mad-Hatter Swede who got lost in the world. A person with too many windmills in her head and as crooked as the letter z of her name." "Sometimes I feel very far from the norm of just about everything," wrote Zetterling. "But 'on, on' is the cry, and 'courage': courage to believe in one's self." Her dedication to her work lasted until her death in 1994. Mai Zetterling would continue to be known for her contribution to Swedish film as an advocate for women's rights and a critic of contemporary society.