Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman

Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman

This article relates to Girl, 1983

In Girl, 1983, Linn Ullmann uses the tools of fiction to dissect a teenaged narrator's traumatic encounter with an older man. That narrator's biography has numerous parallels to Ullmann's own, including a turbulent adolescence divided among New York, Norway, and Sweden—the result of being the daughter of actress Liv Ullmann and director Ingmar Bergman, two of the most important European cultural figures of the 20^th century.

The elder Ullmann and Bergman met in 1965, when she was in her mid-20s and he was in his mid-40s. Both were married at the time; Bergman had in fact been married four times already and had seven children. The director was by this point one of Europe's foremost filmmakers, having achieved international success in the late 1950s with avant-garde works such as The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. Ullmann had established herself as a stage actress but was still a relative unknown when Bergman cast her in Persona (opposite his former lover, Bibi Andersson). The film was quickly hailed a masterpiece, and it launched an intense personal and professional relationship that was to last decades.

Not long after the two met, Ullmann left her husband and moved to Fårö, the remote island in the Baltic where Bergman had decided to build his home after using it as the location for Through a Glass Darkly in 1961. The couple quickly had a daughter (Linn, the author of Girl, 1983), and at first life on the island was idyllic: Ullmann has described her first year there as like "living in soft walls of sunlight, desire and happiness." The honeymoon wasn't to last, however, and the island of a few hundred people came to resemble something of a prison for Ullmann. Bergman was notoriously possessive, with a jealousy that Ullmann has described as "violent and without boundaries." He would only allow her to meet others on a Wednesday, and she remembers how, on her return, she would find him standing watch and waiting for her.

The intensity of the relationship didn't bode well for its longevity, and it ended messily in the early 1970s as a result of one of the director's infidelities. However, out of their romantic breakup, the pair salvaged what came to be an extremely fruitful creative partnership. Acclaimed films Face to Face and Autumn Sonata earned both of them Academy Award nominations in the 1970s, and they continued collaborating until Bergman retired from directing in 1982. (Bergman wrote his final film, Fanny and Alexander, with Ullmann in mind, and the actress has spoken of her regret at turning down the lead role. It would go on to win four Oscars.)

Bergman died in 2007, on his island home of Fårö. He left behind a celebrated artistic legacy, but a more complicated personal one. As their daughter Linn writes in Unquiet, the first book in her current trilogy, "I was his child and her child, but never their child, it was never us three." Her mother has spoken of how upset she first was at her daughter's "very selective … memories of her childhood"—but the impact of Linn's unstable early years is undeniable when reading her work. Yet in spite of their turbulent relationship, Ullmann and Bergman created enduring landmarks in the history of film; and as time passes, Ullmann's contribution to that legacy is being better appreciated. As John Lithgow said when she was finally awarded an Oscar in 2022, "Ingmar is a genius who made all these movies, but the question is, 'What would he have been without Liv?'"

Liv Ullmann with daughter Linn, 1966
Photo by Rigmor Dahl Delphin (1908-1993), courtesy of Oslo Museum

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This article relates to Girl, 1983. It first ran in the July 30, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.