Bibi Andersson gives Bergman’s troubled worlds people we are glad to spend time with. We value her warmth, but her work grows more unsettling when that ease gives way to insecurity and anger.
Fi1m perspective
In The Seventh Seal (1957), Bibi Andersson’s Mia gives us someone to care about while the knight wrestles with questions about faith. Alongside Nils Poppe’s Jof and Gunnar Björnstrand’s Jöns, she helps keep the people from disappearing beneath the discussion. We felt relieved by their companionship, because Bergman lets physical life and humour matter beside the knight’s distress. Mia has a place in the allegory, but Andersson gives her enough individuality that we want to spend time with her. The dialogue occasionally labours the questions about faith, so her contribution is especially welcome.
Her early parts could ask too little of her. Devoted wives and figures of youthful hope risked confining her to being reassuring, with little space for less agreeable feelings. In Wild Strawberries (1957), the double role of Sara sets lost youthful love beside a free-spirited hitchhiker, allowing her to bring lightness and a sense of experience to the same film. The more consequential change came with parts that allowed insecurity and anger to become as important as charm.
In Persona (1966), she plays the nurse Alma, and the extended monologues draw on her capacity for vulnerability and rage. Her candour in close-up matters here: beneath the composed surface, the character is much less sure of herself. She can sustain a long speech without smoothing away the changes in feeling, giving us more to attend to than the words alone.
Bergman remains the director through whom we would introduce her, though her work also extended to international films and the stage. In Scenes from a Marriage (1974), she plays Katarina, while Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson carry the central quarrels. The painful familiarity of those arguments makes the film worth the strain, even when their repetition wears us down. For a first encounter, choose The Seventh Seal and pay as much attention to Mia as to the knight’s questions.
Biography
Bibi Andersson was a Swedish actress. Born Berit Elisabet Andersson on 11 November 1935 in Kungsholmen, Stockholm, she studied at the Royal Dramatic Theatre School. She first collaborated with director Ingmar Bergman on a 1951 soap advertisement and made her screen debut in Dum-Bom (1953).
Andersson appeared in ten Bergman features and three television films, including Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Seventh Seal (1957) as Mia, Wild Strawberries (1957) as Sara, Persona (1966) as Alma and Scenes from a Marriage (1974). She received four Guldbagge Awards, a shared Best Actress prize at Cannes in 1958 for Brink of Life and the Silver Bear at Berlin in 1963 for The Mistress. Her other credits include Babette's Feast (1987) and Arn: The Knight Templar (2007). She also worked in theatre and international films such as I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977). Andersson died on 14 April 2019.
