Born Berit Elisabeth Andersson, 11 November 1935 in Stockholm. Her elder sister Gerd studied ballet at the Royal Swedish Opera, and she herself at the Gösta Terserus stage school and the Royal Dramatic Theatre Dramaten (1954-6).

Bibi Andersson made her film debut at the age of 15 in one of Ingmar Bergman's commercials for Bris soap, in which she played a princess who has to give a swineherd a hundred kisses in return for a bar of soap. In her early career she also acted with Nils Poppe in Dumbom (1953) and Edvard Persson in En natt på Glimmingehus (1954). These "fresh-faced girl roles" were something into which she became typecast during the 1950s, a decade when she remained "the natural, fresh dream of youth in Swedish film". The first director to cast Bibi Andersson in a more mature character (with Bergman and Brink of Life as a possible exception) was Vilgot Sjöman in The Mistress, a role for which she picked up the Best Actress award at the 1963 Berlin Film Festival.

© SVT Bild

In Images from the Playground, Bibi Andersson comments upon her Bergman roles:

"Several times I had this thought… 'He doesn't think I have any more to give.' But I will show him what dramatic talent I possess! Yet I had to do all these nice  
schoolgirls. Which I didn't want to do. I wanted to do the parts that Harriet got. And then Liv got them. I was a bit overlooked there, I thought. As I'm a sourpuss when I feel I've been passed over. But he gave me very beautiful parts.
Wonderful people, in fact."

Photo: Louis Huch
© AB Svensk Filmindustri

In 1956 she joined Bergman's group of actors at the Malmö City Theatre, where her roles included the lead in Hjalmar Bergman's Sagan (1958), a part that she recreated at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, also under Bergman, in 1963. She also had minor roles in some of Bergman's films from the 50s, such as Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Seventh Seal (1957) and Wild Strawberries (1957). After Malmö City Theatre she was briefly at the Uppsala City Theatre until she joined the Royal Dramatic Theatre in 1959, where she has remained on and off ever since. At the Royal Dramatic Theatre she played the Marilyn Monroe-inspired lead in Arthur Miller's After the Fall (1962), and also the young wife in Bergman's production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1963).

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In the middle of the 60s she played her first leading role for Bergman in Persona. Her interaction with Liv Ullmann in that film ranks among the greatest acting in Swedish cinema, and Andersson was rewarded with a Guldbagge for her efforts.

© AB Svensk Filmindustri

In the wake of Persona she had an uneven international career that included westerns and disaster movies, but also roles for John Huston and Robert Altman. Her best-known non-Swedish film, however, is Gabriel Axel's Oscar-winning Babette's Feast (1987), in which she played a minor role alongside Jarl Kulle. 1977 saw her on Broadway Broadway in the role of Siri von Essen alongside Max von Sydow as Strindberg in Per Olov Enquist's The Night of the Tribades. She had also played Siri von Essen the year before in her husband at the time Kjell Grede's Strindberg series (A Madman's Defence) for Sveriges Television, produced by Ingmar Bergman's company Cinematograph. Following on from Bergman's tax authority problems, Bibi Andersson was also involved in a tax investigation in 1978, in which the authorities alleged that she had not paid tax on the fees she received from Bergman's Swiss-registered company Persona Film.
In the 1980s Bibi Andersson tried her hand at directing, with productions in Stockholm of Sam Shepard's True West and Suzanne Brøgger's After the Orgy. Her autobiography Ett ögonblick ("One Moment") was published by Norstedts in 1996.

In the 1980s Bibi Andersson tried her hand at directing, with productions in Stockholm of Sam Shepard's True West and Suzanne Brøgger's After the Orgy. Her autobiography Ett ögonblick ("One Moment") was published by Norstedts in 1996.

Also during the 1980s she was publicly and actively involved in peace and feminist-related issues. In the 1990s she became involved in the Sarajevo Open Road project, which aimed to bring the arts to war-torn Yugoslavia. She herself played on the stage in Sarajevo. In 2005 she performed a monologue about the 18th century Swedish noblewoman Magdalena Rudenschöld at a small theatre in Antibes.

Photo: Patrik Österberg
© Svenska Filminstitutet

In recent years she has enjoyed something of a comeback in Swedish film with Guldbagge award-winning roles in Måns Herngren and Hannes Holm's Shit Happens (Det blir aldrig som man tänkt sig) (2000) and in Klaus Härö's Elina (Elina som om jag inte fanns (2003). That same year, Härö was awarded the Ingmar Bergman Prize.

For her part as callous abbess in Arn: The Knight Templar (2007) she was awarded Guldbagge for best supporting actress, becoming with her four trophies the most awarded actor in the Swedish Film Gala history.

© AB Svensk Filmindustri

In Stig Björkman's Cannes screened film Images from the Playground (2009), Bibi Andersson does one of two speakers.

Bibi Andersson lives in Tourette sur Loup just north of Nice on the French Riviera. Apart from her marriage to Kjell Grede, she has also been married to the politician Per Ahlmark and, since 2004, to the doctor Gabriel Mora Baeza.

Sources 

Myggans nöjeslexikon
Bra Böckers Film och TV-lexikon
"Filmstjärnor" av Bengt Forslund

Cooperation with Ingmar Bergman

Credits