A Bergman actor who spent two loud films standing quietly at the edge of them, and left more of a mark than the scripts intended. The Star Wars prequels are where most viewers met Pernilla August; the Swedish work is where to look for the rest.
Fi1m perspective
Anakin Skywalker goes looking for his mother in Attack of the Clones (2002), and for ten minutes the film stops shouting. Pernilla August plays Shmi Skywalker in both of George Lucas's first two prequels, and in both she is the quiet at the edge of the frame: a woman on Tatooine whom our review of The Phantom Menace (1999) did not find room to mention, which tells you how much the film gave her to do. That is the habit worth noticing. She is nearly always somebody's mother, and she listens better than most actors talk.
The rest of the career happened in Swedish, and mostly with Ingmar Bergman. He noticed her while she was still a student and gave her Maj, the nanny in Fanny and Alexander (1982). Ten years later he wrote his own mother for her, Anna in The Best Intentions (1992), which Bille August directed, and it is the film most people name first. On stage at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, under Bergman, she went from Ophelia to Nora to Mary Stuart. Liv Ullmann directed her in Private Confessions. She has since directed a feature herself, Beyond (2010), and was Queen Kristina in Young Royals (2021).
Against that, the two films most British viewers know her from are a thin showing, and she knew the risk. "I was so worried about taking the role in Episode I and acting in English for the first time," she said afterwards, and Lucas's films are not built to help a nervous actor. They are built around chases and explanations, and Shmi is neither. In The Phantom Menace she is a presence rather than a part.
And yet the one stretch of Attack of the Clones that got past our guard belongs to her. We will not say what Anakin finds on Tatooine. We were more affected than we expected to be by a film that had spent the previous hour losing us, and the reasons are on the screen: Christensen given a scene without speeches, John Williams going quiet for once, and a character the two films have kept at the margins turning out to be the one the story has been circling. It only works because Shmi was there in the earlier film, unshowy and unhurried, for us to remember. That is a small achievement in a big machine, and it is hers.
So the caveat is a simple one. If you have only seen her in a galaxy far, far away, you have seen two small parts by an actor Bergman worked with from her twenties to her forties. Go to The Best Intentions, or back to Fanny and Alexander, where she is given a whole film rather than the last ten minutes of somebody else's.
Biography
Pernilla August is a Swedish actress, director and screenwriter. Born Mia Pernilla Hertzman-Ericson on 13 February 1958 in Stockholm, she began acting as a child and trained professionally at the Statens scenskola from 1979. Her early film work includes a role in Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (1982).
She maintained a long collaboration with Bergman and won the Best Actress award at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival for her performance in The Best Intentions (1992), written by Bergman and directed by Bille August. August is known internationally for playing Shmi Skywalker in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) and Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002), and voicing the character in an episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2011). Her other credits include Young Royals (2021) as Queen Kristina and various Swedish and international films and television series.
