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Ingrid ThulinImage: Wikimedia Commons

People

Ingrid Thulin

Swedish actress (1926-2004)

Ingrid Thulin was a Swedish actor and director, born in Sollefteå on 27 January 1926 and died in Stockholm on 7 January 2004. Trained in ballet and at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, she became one of Ingmar Bergman's central performers, appearing in Wild Strawberries, Brink of Life, The Magician, Winter Light, The Silence, Hour of the Wolf and Cries and Whispers. She shared the Best Actress award at Cannes in 1958 for Brink of Life, worked with Visconti and Resnais, and directed the feature Broken Sky (1982).

Ingrid Thulin appears in 9 films in The Rerun, from 1957 to 1976. Most of that work is in drama, thriller and horror. Frequent collaborators in The Rerun: Ingmar Bergman (6), Max von Sydow (4), Erland Josephson (3), Gertrud Fridh (3), Naima Wifstrand (3).

Known for

  • The Silence (1963). Won the inaugural Guldbagge Award for Best Actress.
  • Brink of Life (1958). Won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival.
  • Cries and Whispers (1972). Brought a BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
  • Wild Strawberries (1957). One of her 1950s Swedish films.

Career

Thulin’s partnership with Bergman began with Wild Strawberries (1957), in which she played Marianne, the daughter-in-law who drives Isak Borg across Sweden. Brink of Life (1958) brought the shared Cannes prize, and The Silence (1963) won her the Guldbagge Award for Best Actress. Her work for Bergman is spare, controlled and often painful to watch, which is the point.

Hollywood was a brief detour: in MGM’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse her voice was dubbed by Angela Lansbury. European cinema served her better, with Alain Resnais’s The War Is Over and Luchino Visconti’s The Damned. She later directed and co-wrote Broken Sky (1982), a study of a teenage girl coming of age.

Where to start

  • Wild Strawberries (1957): the most approachable of her Bergman films.
  • The Silence (1963): her award-winning performance, and Bergman at his most austere.
  • Cries and Whispers (1972): a late, harrowing collaboration in saturated red.

Movies

Quick answers

When was Ingrid Thulin born?
Ingrid Thulin was born on 27 January 1929.

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