Ullmann, Liv (1939—)

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Ullmann, Liv (1939—)

Internationally acclaimed Norwegian actress and director who is particularly known for her work with Ingmar Bergman. Born Liv Johanne Ullmann in Tokyo, Japan, on December 16, 1939; daughter of Viggo Ullmann (an aircraft engineer) and Janna (Lund) Ullmann; married Jappe Stang (a physician), in 1960 (divorced 1965); married Donald Saunders (a real-estate developer), in 1985 (divorced 1995, then reconciled, though not remarried); children: (with Ingmar Bergman) daughter Linn Ullmann (b. 1966, a writer).

Awards:

Best Actress of the Year, National Society of Critics in America (1969, 1970, 1974); New York Film Critics' Award (1973, 1974); Hollywood Foreign Press Association's Golden Globe (1973); Best Actress of the Year, Swedish television (1973); Donatello Award (Italy, 1975); Bambi Award (Germany, 1975); nominated for Tony Award as Best Actress for her Broadway debut in A Doll's House (1975); Los Angeles Film Critics' Award (1976); New York Film Critics' Award (1977); National Board of Review of Motion Pictures Award (1977); Peer Gynt Award (Norway, 1982); Eleanor Roosevelt Award (1982); Roosevelt Freedom Medal (1984); Dag Hammarskjold Award (1986).

Made theater debut in role of Anne Frank in the repertory company of Stavanger (1956); appeared in numerous movies and plays (1962–92); met Ingmar Bergman (1964); worked as goodwill ambassador for UNICEF (1980—); directed Sofie (1992); directed Kristen Lavransdatter, a huge hit in Norway (1995); directed Private Confessions (Private Conversations ) from a screenplay by Bergman (1996); directed Faithless, from a screenplay by Bergman (2001).

Selected filmography:

(as actress) Pan (1965), Persona (1966), The Hour of the Wolf (1968), Shame (1968), The Passion of Anna (1969), The Night Visitor (1971), The Emigrants (1972), Cries and Whispers (1972), Pope Joan (1972), Lost Horizon (1973), 40 Carats (1973), The New Land (1973), Zandy's Bride (1973), Scenes from a Marriage (1974), The Abdication (1974), Face to Face (1975), The Serpent's Egg (1978), Autumn Sonata (1978), Richard's Things (1980), The Wild Duck (1983), Love Streams (1983), Baby Boy (1984), Let's Hope It's a Girl (1985), Dangerous Moves (1985), Gaby Brimmer (Gaby—A True Story, 1986), Moscow Adieu (1986), Time of Indifference (1987), La Amiga (1987), The Rose Garden (1989), Mindwalk (1991), The Ox (1991), The Long Shadow (1992); (as director) Parting (late 1970s), Sofie (1992), Kristen Lavransdatter (1995), Private Confessions (Private Conversations, 1996), Faithless (2001).

Selected plays:

Brand (1973); A Doll's House (1975); Anna Christie (1977); I Remember Mama (1979); Ghosts (1982); Old Times (1985).

Selected writings:

Forandringen (Changes, 1976); Choices (1984).

Liv Ullmann opens her autobiographical work Changes by recounting the memories of her mother Janna Lund Ullmann at the time of Liv's birth, on December 16, 1939, in Tokyo. A mouse ran across the floor, which she considered a sign of good luck; and a nurse bent over her, wondering in apologetic whispers whether the mother herself preferred to break the news to her husband that the child she had borne was another girl.

The Ullmanns would need all the luck a mouse could herald. Four months later, Hitler's troops invaded Norway. Rather than returning to their homeland, Liv's father Viggo Ullmann, an aircraft engineer then employed in Tokyo, opted to bring his wife and two daughters to Canada, where he could work in the displaced Norwegian Air Force. They joined the "Little Norway" colony of exiles outside Toronto, where they lived until 1943, when Viggo accidentally walked into a moving airplane propeller. A transfer to New York for treatment failed to save his life, and he died in a hospital just before the war's end. Two telegrams crossed the Atlantic on that occasion; one carrying the news of his death to relatives in Norway, the other bringing the message that Liv's grandfather had died in the German concentration camp at Dachau.

A few weeks later, Janna Ullmann sailed for Norway with Liv and her older sister on a passenger-carrying freighter. She settled in the family home near Trondheim, where the girls could go to school and enjoy the proximity of relatives. Liv, a small, thin, awkward child, lonely and wild, was desperate to fit in with friends and classmates, but her primary accomplishment was a solitary activity: doing handstands on the handlebars of her bicycle. At dancing school, she was never asked to dance, and she spent her first ball in the ladies' room in her sister's hand-me-down pink silk dress. What she remembers most clearly is the feeling of being "outside," of being "different," a feeling she would battle throughout her life. "I lie in my bed at night and listen to the grownups talking and laughing in the living room," she writes in Changes, "and I think that when I grow up, I, too, will be a part of this wonderful world of ideas and laughter. But I am grown up and I am still outside."

She was at home, however, in the world of the imagination. Given to writing and directing plays and offering recitations, she would arrange theater performances in the high school gym. She wrote the plays, directed them, and cast herself in the best parts. Unconcerned about whether or not they had an audience, she and her friends explored the endless possibilities of "theater." At age 17, she announced to her family that she was finished with school and would not waste another day on the road to graduation. Instead, she would become an actress. Members of her father's family tried to dissuade her, appealing to her sense of obligation to the name of Ullmann. One even wrote her mother suggesting that it was fortunate Viggo had died before he learned about his daughter's failure to uphold their standards. (It would not help matters when her first film included a scene of her bathing naked.)

After she was denied admission to Oslo's National Theater School, Ullmann spent the money she had inherited from her father on a six months' stay in London, living at the local YWCA and hoping to gain entrance to the theater world there. Readings each morning with Irene Brent , an actress, were the closest she got to the stage. The rest of the day she would spend at the movies; ultimately, she was like other Norwegian women at the YWCA, who "improved their English a little and returned to Norway."

Back in Oslo, Ullmann failed the audition to the Theater School once more. She spent that evening walking the streets, convinced that her life would forever be like the balls where outsiders stood crying in the ladies' room in pink dresses. "In one night it was as if everything known and familiar had been torn away and I was in a place of transition." By morning, she had dimly perceived that her disappointment had a lesson in it, difficult but indispensable for growth: an individual must take responsibility for her life and be willing to accept grief as a stage in her development. She spent time at the library or did odd jobs, such as licking stamps or writing addresses, to make enough money to eat.

Ullmann's first break came with an offer from the repertory company at Stavanger to play the lead in The Diary of Anne Frank. Identifying completely with Anne Frank , she gave a performance that caused critics to rave about her "letting Anne play Anne." "Each night's performance was real for me," she said. "I knew it was theater, but it was the reality of the theater. I felt the way I did as a child. I lived in the world of the imagination but I used real feelings and longings inside these fantasies." Ullmann stayed with the company for three years. On her return to Oslo, she obtained the coveted entry into Oslo's Theater School, where she would play Nora, Ophelia, and Juliet.

In Stavanger, she had experienced more than artistic success, for she had met Jappe Stang, a young doctor whom she married in 1960. Liv liked his courtly persona and romantic dreams, thinking them like her own. Their marriage lasted five years before foundering. "I was dependent and happy because he was the stronger and would protect me … [yet] from time to time we would experience a sudden hatred for one another because we felt a limitation we could not define…. [I]t was as if we never had occasion to really get to know one another…. I grieve above all about the many things we did not say."

The quiet, self-effacing young woman nonetheless was becoming an increasingly articulate actress. Ullmann was fortunate in having excellent directors early on. At the theater in Oslo, she worked with Peter Palitzsch, a former assistant director to Bertolt Brecht, who taught her to develop a balance between intuition and technique. He made her observe herself, constantly questioned her motivation for actions or gestures, and encouraged her to act not simply with her own emotions but with what she had learned about the character she was portraying.

World-renowned director Ingmar Bergman continued the process of development Palitzsch had started. Ullmann and Bergman met in 1964 and made their first film together that summer. It was an enchanted season for both, artistically and personally. Persona, with Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, was released to great international acclaim. Ullmann and Bergman also fell so deeply in love that both divorced their mates (his fourth) in anticipation of living together on the Baltic island of Farö, which had been the location of the film.

The second time Ullmann visited the island was to celebrate the raising of the roof on the house they were building for the life they were to share. It was winter, and the return to what had been the setting for a summer of incipient love proved a shock. The weather was cold beyond endurance, the ground was dry and stony, and not even the bottle of Champagne she broke against the rafters could bring back the splendor of the summer. Nevertheless, Bergman and Ullmann spent five years together in the island house, joined after her birth in 1966 by their daughter Linn Ullmann . Linn would later become one of Norway's leading journalists and literary critics and publish her first novel Before You Sleep in 2000. Reflecting on her relationship with Bergman, Ullmann notes, "We came into one another's life too early and too late. I sought total security, protection—and had a deep need to belong. He sought a mother's embrace: warm and without complications. Perhaps our violent love affair was based on an experience of loneliness both of us had had…. Our needs were beyond gratification." Bergman's jealousy became the ultimate corrodent in their relationship. He forbid her contact with friends and relatives, and their dry, barren island with its contorted pine trees became as if a prison for Ullmann; yet there were times she felt more alive there than ever. The short interludes of total happiness interspersed with long periods of pain and sorrow, she believes, helped to bring about the growth—the changes in herself—that she was seeking.

The island's isolated setting provided the backdrop for several other films, among them The Hour of the Wolf (1968). In that movie, Ullmann plays a pregnant wife drawn into the madness which is engulfing her husband, a gifted painter. Issues of individual growth and self assertion are further explored in Shame (1968) and The Passion of Anna (1969), which were also filmed on the island during Ullmann and Bergman's years together. Again, biographical material informs the films' stories, which suggest that the violence and cruelty of the action on screen are due to the characters' inability to see

themselves truthfully and to overcome their mutual isolation. For Ullmann's performance in Shame, considered one of Bergman's best films, movie critic Stanley Kauffmann gave her superior marks. "She now stands with Bibi Andersson and Vanessa Redgrave in the front rank of the world's young film actresses. She makes every moment crystalline, the quintessence of what it is about."

Bergman and Ullmann parted ways in 1969. The possible reason, said Ullmann, was that Ingmar seemed to need to view her as a woman "of one piece, with no neuroses." But the couple remained good friends and collaborators. "The best thing about him was how wonderful he was when it was over," she said. "I needed to talk to him every day, and he allowed me to do that. He never hung up on me. Most of them hang up. The terrible thing is when someone leaves you and you hear the door bang." Ullmann raised their daughter alone thereafter, without monetary support from Bergman (who was well able to afford it), although Linn did spend summers with her father. The close relationship between mother and daughter was complicated by Ullmann's many moves and busy work schedule over the years, and she would later express some bewilderment at the less than wholly complimentary portrait of the actress mother in Linn's semi-autobiographical first novel.

I never thought of myself as a muse…. I'm not sure what it is. If it's complimentary, then I want to be it. If it means being a pupil, then I don't want to be it.
—Liv Ullmann

In 1971, Ullmann joined other Bergman actors to film Cries and Whispers, an acknowledged and much-honored masterpiece. Ullmann gave a powerful performance as the beautiful and self-centered Maria, who comes to her sister's death bed bringing neither comfort nor compassion. "Liv Ullmann's Maria is a vacuous creative substance," wrote Jay Cocks, "a paradox which is one excellent measure of Bergman's talent and of Miss Ullmann's." Pauline Kael was less satisfied by Ullmann's 1978 performance in Autumn Sonata. "That performance," wrote Kael, "doesn't have the beauty and clarity that her work had earlier…. There is a growing helplessness about her work for Bergman—a lack of shape, of completeness…. She enters into Ingmar Bergman's disturbed emotions and puts them on the screen, just as he desires; neither of them does the shaping job of an artist in Autumn Sonata—their collaboration has become a form of folie à deux." Kael, however, would laud Ullmann's 1973 performance in The Emigrants to the point of finding it almost beyond discussion. "There don't seem to be any performances. Ullmann and Von Sydow move in and out of frame, courting, marrying, having children. They belong to the region and the life there, and after a while you forget this is the same Liv Ullmann you've seen in the Bergman films."

Perhaps Ullmann herself felt that her inborn desire to please might prove a hindrance to the development and exploration of her talent. During the filming of Autumn Sonata, Ingrid Bergman successfully challenged Ingmar Bergman on character interpretation, while Ullmann looked on with awe. "I used to sit in a corner and admire her," she said, "because this is the kind of woman I wanted to be." At any rate, Ullmann was now developing a repertoire of performances outside Bergman's territory. She had filmed in England, France, Denmark, Rumania, Sweden, and in America several times. Filming in the United States led her to consider living there, although she felt ambivalent about it: "I know that today people will invest in my talent and my personality, but what will happen when I grow too old? When I am no longer a commodity, a marketable article?" And yet, she found much to like in America: "a friendliness and generosity unlike anywhere else in the world. A love of work—a living film history—where one can still meet historical persons at a party, an atmosphere of earlier days which remains in the walls of the studios, in people's consciousness and their conversations." She found some of her best friends there as well.

Meanwhile, she was also successful as a stage actress. Ullmann's initial role was that of Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House, a part she played first in Oslo, then on Broadway. Wrote Kauffmann, "This is the only Nora I have seen who seemed to me in genuine pain, under the smiling and skittering, from the very start: a woman who loves her husband insofar as she then understands him and the meaning of love, who loves her children and the idea of family life, but who is in a twofold anguish: fear of blackmail, for the forgery she committed out of love and discomfort with a society that has made her desperate action the only way she could act, that has emphasized her inferior position as woman." He called the last scene in which Nora leaves her husband and children "credible, courageous and lonely…. When she takes off her wedding ring and then holds out her hand for Torvald's ring, we have a performance that is a realized theatrical joy." Not surprisingly, Ullmann won a Tony Award for Best Actress for her performance.

In 1979, Ullmann returned to American theater as the lead in a musical version of I Remember Mama, based on Kathryn McLean 's memoirs of growing up in America in a Norwegian immigrant family. Having already been panned for her singing and dancing in the 1973 movie musical Lost Horizon, she initially was wary of accepting the part. Upon meeting the play's composer Richard Rodgers, she told him she could neither sing nor dance. As she related, "[H]e said, 'Don't fear.' He was already sick and old and close to 80 at that time, and just sitting at his piano and he was so sweet and thin, and he said, 'Just sing Happy Birthday.' So I sang Happy Birthday and he aged 10 years, just like that." The show nonetheless ran for eight months. Toward the end of the run, Ullmann and other artists staged a campaign to collect money for Cambodian refugees. Moved by the refugees' plight, she traveled to the border of Cambodia and to refugee camps in Hong Kong and Macao, a journey which offered her "images that were never before part of my world." This first journey led to several; named the first female goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, she traveled to Asia, Africa, South America and Haiti.

The late 1970s offered another challenge, when Ullmann was asked to direct a film she had scripted many years earlier. Parting covers one morning in the life of an old man, a "guardian of love," as he visits his comatose wife in her hospital room. He feeds her, reads to her from the Bible, and before he leaves, "touches her tenderly." While Ullmann remained active as an actress over the next decade, it would be directing that finally claimed her full interest.

In 1992, she co-wrote and directed Sofie, a domestic drama set in Copenhagen late in the 19th century that many critics described as "Bergmanesque." Ullmann next wrote the screenplay for and directed the first screen adaptation of Sigrid Undset 's classic Kristen Lavransdatter, which after its release in Norway in 1995 became one of the most widely seen movies in that country's history; some half the population is estimated to have seen it during its theatrical run. The following year, Bergman gave her the screenplay for the final installment of his trilogy of films (begun with Fanny and Alexander and Best Intentions) about his parents' lives. Private Conversations (1996, released in the U.S. in 1999 as Private Confessions), starring Pernilla August and Max von Sydow, was widely acclaimed, and Ullmann received critical praise for both skillful directing and the film's fidelity to Bergman's trademark bleak vision.

Having overcome her earlier reservations, Ullmann now lives in the U.S., and when she is not traveling or working spends most of her time in Florida and Boston with her former husband Donald Saunders, with whom she was reconciled soon after they divorced in 1995. Her most recent movie also had a screenplay by Bergman, based on earlier events in his life; Faithless (2001), the story of a passionate affair that destroys a marriage and a family before itself being destroyed by the cruelty of one of the lovers, received glowing reviews for stars Lena Endre and Thomans Hanzon and for Ullmann's uncompromising direction. Daphne Merkin notes, "What is perhaps most interesting about the film… is its focus on the unforeseen harm done to children by the behavior of irresponsible adults." Many of the scenes in the film contain the mute presence of the daughter of one of the lovers, who, Merkin continues, "watches the breakup of her parents' marriage with enormous reproachful eyes." "The child was never in the script," Ullmann said. "Without changing any of [Bergman's] words, because he's very protective of his words, I put her in there, listening, vulnerable, desolate."