Ingrid Thulin

With Ingrid Bergman and Greta Garbo, Ingrid Thulin is often cited as one of the best Swedish actress of all time. The blue-eyed blonde personified cool, somewhat aloof, sensuality in a number of films directed by Ingmar Bergman yet simultaneously, the actress was able to depict suffering with her own brand of Scandinavian vigor.

Trained as a ballet dancer, Thulin shifted to theater and first worked with Bergman in several stage productions. While still a student at Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theatre, she made her first film appearances. Billed as 'Ingrid Tulean', she was cast in her first American film, "Foreign Intrigue" (1956), as Robert Mitchum's love interest. But it was not until Bergman cast her as the woman suffering from the slings of her father-in-law (Victor Sjostrom) in "Wild Strawberries" (1957) that she achieved international renown.

Thulin lent her beauty and talent as Max Von Sydow's wife in Bergman's "The Magician" (1958). With Bibi Andersson and Eva Dahlbeck, she shared Best Actress honors at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival for their performances as pregnant women in "Brink of Life."

By the 1960s, Thulin had begun to work in international productions. She was miscast in the lead of Vincente Minnelli's "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" (1962) and her work was further diluted when her lines were redubbed by Angela Lansbury. Thulin fared much better as Yves Montand's mistress in Alain Resnais' political drama "La Guerre est finie/The War Is Over" (1966) and in Luchino Visconti's "The Damned" (1969), as the matriarch of a German family whose decline parallels Hitler's rise,

She returned to the Bergman stock company for superb turns as the suicidal sister in "Cries and Whispers" (1972) and a washed-up stage actress with a drinking problem in "After the Rehearsal" (1984). The still beautiful Thulin had her last screen role (to date) as an elderly woman living in a nursing home who embarks on a love affair with a fellow patient in "La Casa del Sorriso/House of Smiles" (1990).

In addition to films, Thulin has made rare appearances on Broadway (in 1967's "Of Love Remembered") and on the small screen. She was tapped to play the Ingrid Bergman role in a 1961 TV remake of "Intermezzo" (NBC) and played the mystical older sister of Burt Lancaster's "Moses--the Lawgiver" (CBS, 1975).

Under the auspices of her second husband, Harry Schein, the founder of the Swedish Film Institute, Thulin directed the short film "Hangivelsen/Devotion" (1965), co-directed (with Erland Josephson and Sven Nykvist) "En och En/One and One" (1978) and co-wrote and directed "Brusten Himmel/Broken Sky" (1982). The latter was an ambitious character study of a teenaged girl coping with maturity.