Berit Elisabet Andersson, known professionally as Bibi Andersson, was a Swedish actress who was best known for her frequent collaborations with filmmaker Ingmar Bergman.
Early life and career
Andersson was born in Kungsholmen, Stockholm, the daughter of Karin, a social worker, and Josef Andersson, a businessman. Her first collaboration with Ingmar Bergman came in 1951, when she participated in his production of an advertisement for the detergent Bris. She also worked as an extra on film sets as a teenager, and studied acting at the Terserus Drama School and at the Royal Dramatic Theatre School. She then joined the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Andersson starred in ten motion pictures and three television films directed by Bergman. With Ingrid Thulin and Eva Dahlbeck, she shared the Best Actress Prize at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival for the director's Brink of Life, a film set in a maternity ward. The other films included The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician, The Passion of Anna, The Touch, and Persona. In 1963, Andersson won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 13th Berlin International Film Festival for her performance in Vilgot Sjöman's The Mistress.
From the mid-1960s onwards
Andersson's intense portrayal of a nurse in the film Persona – in which the actress Elizabet Vogler, suffering from a psychosomatic condition, is mostly mute – involved her delivering the majority of the dialogue. For her performance in Persona, she won the award for Best Actress at the 4th Guldbagge Awards. That year she was seen alongside James Garner and Sidney Poitier in the western Duel at Diablo. More Bergman collaborations followed, and she worked with John Huston and Robert Altman. She was actor Steve McQueen's co-star in his only credited film as a producer, a film of Arthur Miller's stage adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. Andersson made her debut in American theatre in 1973 with a production of Erich Maria Remarque's Full Circle. Her most famous American film is I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, which also starred Kathleen Quinlan. In 1990, Andersson worked as a theatre director in Stockholm, directing several plays at Dramaten. In the late 1980s and early 1990s she worked primarily in television and as a theatre actress, working with Bergman and others. She was also a supervisor for the Road to Sarajevo, a humanitarian project.
Personal life
In 1996, Andersson published her autobiography, Ett ögonblick. She was married first to the director Kjell Grede with whom she had a daughter; and secondly to politician and writer Per Ahlmark. Andersson then married Gabriel Mora Baeza on 29 May 2004. In 2009, she had a stroke; an article published the following year says that from that time on she had been hospitalized and was unable to speak. She was the younger sister of Swedish film actress Gerd Andersson. Andersson died on 14 April 2019, aged 83.
