Just an Ordinary, Extraordinary Woman

By Gerald Clarke

Liv: the name rhymes with believe, achieve--or grieve. Also Eve. In Norwegian it means "life." It fits the face--the glints of crystalline fjords and upland meadows in the eyes and hair, the shadowy secrets around the wide, sensual mouth. It carries the aura of innocence, of candor, of mischief.

THE role was one of the choicest movie plums in years: Catherine, the beguiling Shangri-La schoolmistress in the musical remake of Lost Horizon. The actress had to combine a peasant beauty with innate grace, be sweet yet sexy, and convey enough emotional depth to make Peter Finch--or any other man--willing to trudge over a snow-blown Himalaya for her. Audrey Hepburn was the sort of woman the part called for, and in fact Audrey was one of the prime prospects. But the part went to Liv Ullmann.

To that bit of casting news, Hollywood had a ready reply: Liv who? Ah, yes, the girl in all those Ingmar Bergman films. But wasn't she a trifle rarefied--an art-house actress? A specialist in gloomy Nordic agonies?

Not at all, as insiders discovered when they saw preview glimpses of her singing and dancing in Lost Horizon. The word, that magic electricity in the film business, went out: somebody fresh and exciting had arrived. Soon it became time to cast the movie adaptation of Broadway's Forty Carats. What was needed was a deft comedienne who could also encompass the transformation from faceless widow to a sparkling "older woman" who carries on an affair with a 20-year-old boy. An Elizabeth Taylor, perhaps. Producer Mike Frankovich wanted Liv Ullmann--so much so that he was willing to have the part rewritten to suit her, lowering the matron's age and making her Scandinavian-born.

The fever steadily gained momentum. Warner Bros, was planning its new version of the Garbo classic about Sweden's 17th century Queen Christina, who converted from Protestantism to Catholicism and abdicated to spend the rest of her life in Rome. The studio had been thinking of Vanessa Redgrave for the title role, with its demands for classical style and impassioned nobility. But no--who better than Liv Ullmann?

All of which means that a new star is about to burst onto U.S. movie screens, starting with the release of Lost Horizon next spring. Currently, audiences in New York City and Los Angeles can see her in a remarkable Swedish epic called The Emigrants (see ESSAY). Hundreds of new stars have burst onto U.S. screens before, of course, many of them producers' playmates, oversold or overaged stage ingenues, voices without bodies, bodies without voices, paper dolls cut out of publicity releases, inflatable, rubberized sex bombs. Liv is something different. Lost Horizon Producer Ross Hunter says, with characteristic modesty: "As soon as I met her I knew that if she would let me I could make her the most attractive woman on the screen. I decided to take a chance on her because I wanted to launch another Ingrid Bergman."

Liv naturally bridles at such comparisons, but Mike Frankovich says, "She has the same kind of vulnerability that Ingrid Bergman had. She has great sex, but it's innocent. We thought at first that she was much too young to play in Forty Carats, and she is. But all the other women who wanted the part were either invulnerable or too old. You can't believe that Liv has any promiscuity in her. Even if she has love affairs, she is discreet. In her movies, when she looks at someone, it isn't to say 'Let's go to bed,' but rather 'What kind of man are you?'

Nor does her appeal turn off when the cameras do; everyone in Hollywood is in love with her. "If only they were all like her, lady actresses," says Lost Horizon Co-Star Peter Finch. "The nicest goddamn actress I've ever seen on a set," says Laslo Benedek, director of a European mystery titled The Night Visitor. Liv has been accustomed to working in Scandinavia for between $10,000 and $20,000 per picture and being treated as just another member of the company. Now she is in the $200,000 bracket and is as delighted with her limousines and roses from the producer as a girl at her first prom. "I like to be regarded as a star," she says. "I like to be at the center of things in a press conference, stay at fancy hotels and swim in luxury. But that's only for a short time. After such a day I also like to go back to my room, close the door and just be myself. Perhaps I go to the mirror, smile at myself and say: 'Remember, Liv, you are just Liv Ullmann, a quite ordinary actress; just a woman who has been luckier than others.' "

Above all, at 33, Liv is a far more seasoned and accomplished performer than most of the new faces that turn up in Hollywood. Humphrey Bogart was once asked who his favorite actor was. He named Spencer Tracy and gave as his reason: "Because you can't see the machinery working." With Liv, the machinery never shows either. Her previous work has already established that she not only has the unobtrusive yet authoritative presence called star quality but is also perhaps the most impeccably naturalistic actress in films today.

Her first Bergman film, Persona (1966), was as big a triumph for her as it was for Bergman. She played a great stage actress who suffers an obscure spiritual crisis and decides never to speak again. Nor does she for the rest of the film, except for two words: "No, don't." The plot traced a duel of personality between the actress and her talkative nurse (Bibi Andersson), between the actress's corruption of soul and the nurse's innocence. Deprived of words, Liv spoke with a glance, a turn of the head, an enigmatic Gioconda smile. For much of the movie, Bergman simply trained his camera on her face--and that was enough. "Bergman taught me how little you can do rather than how much," she says. "I can now use much smaller means to express what I want to say."

Through the Keyhole. In Bergman's The Shame (1968), a harrowing antiwar movie, she used the same economy in the entirely different role of a housewife caught with her weak, cowardly husband (Max von Sydow) in the midst of a civil war. The opening scene, in which Liv arose, bare-breasted from her bed in the morning, showed how she could turn a perfectly ordinary moment into something powerful and erotic. Neither teasing nor selfconscious, her sleepy grace gave the character an instantaneous reality that made the audience feel they were looking through the keyhole.

Some actresses, a Glenda Jackson or a Bette Davis, for example, achieve greatness through controlled excess and are bold enough to risk doing too much in mastering a role. Liv can take risks in big scenes too, as in the fit of hysterics she threw in the title role of Bergman's The Passion of Anna (1970). But generally she follows Mies van der Rohe's dictum that less is more. She dares to do too little, and builds a character gesture by gesture, inflection by carefully shaded inflection. In her first major non-Bergman movie, The Emigrants, she does not so much master the character of Kristina as she invents her. At the beginning, she is supposed to be still in her teens; without makeup or camera tricks, she conveys the image of youth as she rides casually on an old swing. The secret is all in the way she grips the ropes with light confidence and catches the rhythm of the swing as if her body had no weight at all. It is a small moment, but in such small moments does Liv demonstrate her virtuosity.

Even before she went to Sweden to collaborate with Ingmar Bergman, with whom she has made five films, Liv was a busy leading lady in the theater, TV and films of her native Norway. She played in everything from Hamlet to Faust to Saint Joan. Her ascendancy in Hollywood is Norway's loss all over again, but Norway is getting used to sharing her with the rest of the world. Professionally, that is. Personally she still spends much of her time there and considers her real home to be the spacious frame house she owns half an hour outside Oslo.

In fact, Liv did not even see Norway or any other part of Scandinavia until she was six. She was born in Tokyo, where her father worked as an aircraft engineer. When the Germans overran Norway in 1940, her family joined many exiles in an area outside Toronto called "Little Norway." There her father served in the Norwegian Air Force while she romped with the royal children, Prince Harald and Princesses Ragnhild and Astrid. In 1943 her father suffered a mishap that was eventually to cost him his life. In a bizarre airfield accident, he walked into a whirring propeller. Sent to another job in New York, he appeared to recover, only to die shortly before the end of the war. As soon as passenger ships could cross the Atlantic, his widow Janna took Liv and her sister (also named Janna), two years Liv's senior, to live in Trondheim, a port city 250 miles north of Oslo.

Trying to make up for their father's death, Janna built up for her daughters a fantasy father, someone who would always protect them when they were in trouble. Already hyperimaginative, Liv recalls, she would write "long letters to my father in heaven, telling him all my thoughts, or pleading with him to come back." Whenever she saw a Norwegian airman in the street, she would chase him down to see if he were her father. Both mother and daughter would later regret this overemphasis on an omnipotent male figure.

Homely and flat-chested, or so she thought, Liv was a miserable teen-ager with no friends, male or female. At the beach she kept her shoes on to hide what she rather obsessively regarded as ugly toes. At dancing school she was devastated when the boys picked everyone but her for partners. "I was such a catastrophe," she remembers with lingering bitterness. "I was nothing. I would never make it."

The Best Roles. One day a girl sat down beside her at the school snack bar and chatted with her briefly. The girl probably thought nothing of it, but for months Liv returned to the same table in hopes that the girl would appear again. She never did. "You never get away from these things," Liv says. "Whatever happens to me now has that for a background."

To compensate for her unhappiness she turned to books and religion. She still reads voraciously, and though she prefers to pick up an Agatha Christie between takes on the set, her taste off the set is more serious: Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing. When she was not reading she was writing religious plays, some based on Bible stories and all appropriately gloomy and tragic. "They were all about people hoping for miracles," she says. "Of course I wrote all the best roles for myself."

Spoken like an actress. Even then Liv was nursing her ambition. "I thought secretly to myself that I would show them," she says. At 17 she told her mother that she wanted to go to England to study acting. Mama, more than a little reluctant, admitted her misgivings to a psychiatrist. "Are you thinking of your own happiness or Liv's?" he asked. "That was enough," remembers Janna Ullmann. "I paid the bill and we left."

Whatever eight months in a London drama school did for Liv, it did not equip her to pass her audition for the state theater school in Oslo (no talent, said the examiners). Liv went instead to the repertory Theater in the small (pop. 82,000) city of Stavanger, where she landed the lead in The Diary of Anne Frank. For the first time in her life her reviews were raves. "It was a lovely part," she says. "You couldn't miss. The theater really belonged to you. I was truly lucky. It will never be that way again." But it almost was, both in Stavanger and eventually in Oslo. Liv's only complaint was that the roles were all as heavy as the religious epics she used to write for herself. "Strange," she muses, "When I began I somehow thought I was a comedienne. But instead I was always the tragic heroine or the unhappy woman who loses her lover."

With success came friends, and in 1960 Liv married Oslo Psychiatrist Hans Jacob Stang, five years her senior. Not, of course, that she approved of her husband's profession, which--good Calvinist that she is--she makes sound somewhat like bootlegging. "Psychiatry is quite dangerous for people," she insists sternly, "especially in America, where I think everyone is indulging himself too much. There are two ways to really learn about yourself. One is to just sit and think and the other is to go out of yourself and try to find out why you fail and why you succeed--and what you should do to be a better person. I had a lot of failures, and I started to understand that it couldn't be only other people who were doing wrong things to me. It had to be something inside myself. I started to find out what was wrong with me."

What, in fact, was wrong with her? "I discovered that I had been brought up to be the sort of person people wanted me to be," she says, "so that they would like me and I would not be uncomfortable for them. That person wasn't me at all, because nobody really asked who I was. I wanted to be me, and when I started to be me I felt I had more to give. I found it more interesting to live."

No longer the awkward, intensely lonely teenager, she met Ingmar Bergman, who was for five years, and in many ways still is, the most important person in her life. Bergman had known of her work, and one day in Stockholm he saw her as she was walking down the street with her friend Bibi Andersson, one of Bergman's brightest stars. Liv was almost dumbstruck but remembers the short scene better than any other she has ever played. "He said: 'Would you like to be in one of my pictures?' I blushed and said: 'Of course.' " The image of the two women together struck a chord in Bergman's mind, and a year later he called them to the remote Baltic island of Faaroe, where he has a home and often makes his films, to shoot Persona.

He Was God. "On this island," says Liv in her straightforward way, "I fell in love with Ingmar. My husband and I had had five good years together, but the marriage had failed. I saw later that I had expected my husband to give me the marriage. I thought that marriage was made to serve me, make me happy and give me a husband who protected and took care of me. I learned that it should be something between two equal human beings who help and guide each other. It can't be good when the woman is some sort of clinging flower who sits waiting for her man to bring happiness home."

Her relationship with Bergman was not an equation of equals either; Bergman, probably more than Stang, was the fantasy father to whom she had once written letters. "To me," she says, "he was God. I admired him so much, and I was scared to death of him. I was only 25--too young--and he was 46. When he spoke, I blushed. I remember that he was worried the first week of shooting Persona. But he trusts the people he picks, and the moment you open up he will be there to help."

Often married and more often involved, Bergman seems to draw new strength and youth from each affair. With Liv as his star and companion, he moved into a new creative phase. His pictures became less theological, less concerned with God, man, and the devil, and more concerned with people, especially women. This whole trend is culminated in his latest film, Cries and Whispers, which has yet to be released in either Sweden or the U.S.

Yet if Bergman uses women, they gain at least as much from him. "Ingmar gave me much more self-confidence than I had before," says Liv. "He listened to me. Living with him enriched me. I matured. The world I lived in with my husband was smaller, mostly of neighbors and close friends. With Ingmar's friends I had to sharpen up and find my own identity."

Lasting Trauma. Shortly after they met, Liv became pregnant. "I let it happen," she says. "I wasn't afraid. I felt it was very right." The baby, a girl whom they named Linn, was born during the filming of Hour of the Wolf. Liv, who is enough of a cold-blooded professional to watch herself constantly through a sort of invisible mirror, noted her cries and groans for future reference when she next would play a woman in labor.

Many Norwegians, less sexually liberated than their Swedish neighbors, were scandalized by Liv's unmarried motherhood. They harassed her in much the same way as Americans had harassed Ingrid Bergman 22 years before. Letters came in denouncing her as a sinner and a whore. Some told her that she should take the baby into the woods and leave it; others kindly suggested that she should kill herself as well. The Lutheran Church refused to allow the baby to be baptized. Liv went on Norwegian TV to defend her action in an emotion-charged statement. Though she still believes she acted morally and honestly in not marrying Bergman--"I feel it would be very difficult to twice stand and say to God you will love one another"--the uproar was obviously a painful and lasting trauma.

The Swedes were less concerned about the couple's morality than the Norwegians, but they were morbidly curious to see Bergman's newest companion. Tourists from Stockholm would take boat trips to the island for a glimpse of Liv; when Bergman built a high stone wall around the house, the tourists countered by bringing light metal ladders along from the mainland. It was the first of several strains that life on Faaroe was to entail for Liv.

Too Complicated. The stark isolation of the place made her feel cut off from things. "When my girl friend and I quarrel and she wants to go away and she is all packed," Bergman told one interviewer matter of factly, "everything is always too complicated. First she has to drive by a very complicated way through the woods. Then the ferry boat leaves only on the hour. From there she has to find a flight. So she ends up staying."

Bergman loathed parties and was averse to travel outside his usual working orbit of Faaroe and Stockholm. Once when he did venture to Rome to see Federico Fellini, his favorite film director, Liv could barely budge him from the hotel room. He insisted that they return every day to the first restaurant they had tried; luckily for both they had not stopped at a snack bar. At dinner he always ordered for both of them. When she recently dined at a restaurant with Bergman and his new wife, Ingrid, Liv watched curiously to see if the pattern persisted. Sure enough, Liv reports, Ingrid glanced cautiously at the master after ordering each item.

Proust and Pet. Liv's ideal of conjugal life with Bergman was very conventional. She had a vision of them walking arm and arm along a softly lighted green walk, baby carriage in front and nanny and dog behind. It was a vision out of an old romantic movie or her favorite author, Proust. Ingmar was not interested in wheeling a baby carriage, however, and Liv lapsed into the frightened schoolgirl again. She was not only afraid that the nanny's feelings would be hurt if she pushed the carriage, but she was even worried that the dachshund would feel rejected if she paid too much attention to the baby. As a result, the day she returned from the hospital the nanny pushed the baby carriage, Liv walked behind her, and the dog, which had the imaginative name of Pet, brought up the rear. Ingmar was not part of the procession.

"At home I was running from one room to the other, feeling bad all the time," Liv recounts. "They all needed me. When I was with one, the others were unhappy. Never did I do what I wanted to do." She pauses for a moment in retelling the story. "Now I am trying to do what I want to do in life. This is another thing I learned from Ingmar. He is not afraid to do what he wants to do. We were really living his life."

Lovers to Friends. Eventually Liv and Bergman agreed to a three-month trial separation, and she took Linn, who was nursery-school-age by this time, home to Oslo. With distance between her and Bergman, relations seemed to improve. They talked nightly on the phone, sometimes for as long as two hours. Liv finally told Bergman she wanted to come back. He responded cordially but vaguely, and soon Liv received a letter telling her it was all over. "There is nothing," she says, "that you can say to a letter."

Now that they are no longer lovers, Liv and Bergman are friends. They had no difficulty working together on Cries and Whispers or on a six-part series for Swedish television called Scenes Out of a Marriage, Bergman's longest project so far. They can even laugh together. Once after Cries was finished shooting for the day Liv suggested that they all go to the circus in a nearby town. "I'm not going. I'm going to have a breakdown," joked Bergman. "Can we come to that instead?" asked Liv sweetly. "It sounds a lot more exciting." Incredibly enough, four of Bergman's women worked on the Cries set in apparent harmony. Besides Liv in one of the leading roles, Bergman's wife Ingrid was his assistant, his fourth wife Kaebi Laretei played the piano for the sound track, and little Linn had a walk-on part. Since the parting Bergman has even grown to love the dog, which he keeps with him.

Still, the breakup "was a terrible nightmare," admits Liv. "It was so public. I felt everybody was looking at me. I don't know where you can hide your sorrows any more." Scandal magazines and newspapers hounded her, and reporters and photographers followed her every movement. One day, to get away from them, friends took her out the back door of a Copenhagen hotel, leaving her for a minute in an alley while they fetched a cab. "I was standing there in the garbage," she remembers, "and I felt it was really symbolic. Something died in me. I resolved it would never be the same again." Even at the worst, however, she was looking at herself in that invisible mirror. "I was crying floods of tears and I would think: "This makes me grow as an artist.' "

In her affair with Bergman, Liv resembled another famous Norwegian woman, Nora Helmer in Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879). Like Nora, Liv was loved and protected but also patronized. "I have existed merely to perform tricks for you, Torvald," said Ibsen's heroine to her husband. "But you would have it so." Like Nora, Liv rebelled. As Nora's husband commented shortly before she closed that famous door on her domestic life, "she is terribly self-willed, this sweet little person."

In his television series about marriage Bergman has used Liv to symbolize a woman's emerging consciousness. "Bergman is now starting to create a sort of new woman character," says Liv, "a woman who is really free and who can live without the help and support of a man."

Would Liv like to live without the help and support of a man? Yes and no. "You don't have to probe," she says testily when questions become too personal. "What do you think I feel when I am alone in my room, when there is nobody there? I am very lonely. I want to be in somebody's pocket, to be taken care of." She stops and shakes her head, letting her long blonde hair swirl around her like leaves in a sudden gust. "But then I want to be free too.

"What I need from a man is that he must love me. When I tell him that I want to quit acting and stay home and cook dinners, he must immediately say no." Why? "Because he should know that it is as a working woman that I am happy and can make him happy. He must believe that our relationship is forever and work for it, just as I want to believe it and work for it. And if it is not forever, then he must not be that sort of hateful person who will be inflamed at a breakup."

Culture Shock. Until she finds a man who can put her in his pocket and also let her out, Liv's involvements are few--and quiet. There is a French writer in her recent past; in the U.S. she has seen Warren Beatty a few times, but he does not appear to be the someone whom Liv "cares about very much" right now. "Going to bed is something serious," she says. "I don't want to have shared it with too many." Liv devotes much of her attention to Linn, who, with a nanny, travels to her locations, and she spends as much time as she can at her house in Norway. Built in Norwegian style with a veranda warmed by a fireplace, the house is a haven where she can cook her favorite Chinese dishes, read and muse on the profound culture shock that Hollywood represents for her.

"It's so easy to get spoiled," she worries. "I love the cars and the roses and the champagne, and my mother is just floating with joy. But I feel uneasy. You get too used to it. You count your values and one day you begin to ask: 'Why didn't they send me roses today?' "

Even before Hollywood, she was worried that her life was too good. "My work, everything has gone so well," she says. "I feel guilty about this sometimes. I feel the pendulum will swing back and I will be penalized for my good luck. There is a destiny. I think the life I am leading has to have a conclusion, and I think that conclusion will be bad." She sometimes predicts that she will finish her life paralyzed or crippled, old and alone and above all unloved, with nothing but her books to keep her company. Perhaps it is in hopes of warding off a crippling thunderbolt that she still resists being a star, plays down her fame, dresses unremarkably. "You look just like Liv Ullmann," Oslo store clerks often tell her. "Do you think so?" she always replies. "That's what everybody says."

To Be a Woman. If Liv is headed for a bad end, one would have a hard time proving it by Hollywood. Not that the film colony is blind to the pitfalls that surround her. She is still unfamiliar to mass audiences in the U.S. For every Garbo or Ingrid Bergman before her, there have been dozens of European actresses who have not traveled well. While she was protected by Ingmar Bergman, she had no real chance to make career mistakes. Since being on her own she has made at least two: she signed up for The Night Visitor, a forgettable thriller, and, worse, she threw herself wholeheartedly into a dreadful costume epic called Pope Joan. Her Hollywood agent, Paul Kohner, admits, "It's hard to say yet whether she has any script judgment."

Meanwhile Liv is trying to make sense of it all in her usual way: by describing it in diary-like essays. She scribbles constantly--between takes, in the evenings, on vacations--and hopes to put together a book, part of which is already in the hands of an Oslo publisher. "I want to write about what it feels like to be a woman in this century, where everything has changed," she says, "about what I feel inside myself, having a child and not being married; about my childhood, what is left and what has disappeared. I would call the book The Change."

Another title might be Beyond the Doll's House, for if the book turns out to be all that Liv says it is, it will reveal what Ibsen never did: what Nora found on the other side of that door.

With reporting by Jesse Birnbaum

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.