Liv Ullmann - Career

Career

Ullmann began her acting career on the Norwegian stage in the mid 1950s. She continued to act in the theatre for most of her career, and became noted for her portrayal of Nora in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, but became wider known once she started to work with Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. She went on to act to significant acclaim in 10 of his most-admired films, including Persona (1966), The Passion of Anna (1969), Cries and Whispers (1972) and Autumn Sonata (1978), in which her co-star, Ingrid Bergman, made her return to Swedish cinema. She co-starred often with Swedish actor and fellow Bergman collaborator, Erland Josephson, with whom she made the Swedish television drama, Scenes from a Marriage (1973), which was also edited to feature-film length and distributed theatrically. Ullmann appeared with Laurence Olivier in A Bridge Too Far (1977), directed by Richard Attenborough.

Nominated more than 40 times for awards, including various lifetime achievement awards, she won the best actress prize three times from the National Society of Film Critics, three times from the National Board of Review, received three awards from the New York Film Critics Circle and a Golden Globe. In 1971, Ullmann was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Emigrants, and again in 1976 for Face to Face.

In 1979, Ullmann made her New York City stage debut in the unsuccessful Broadway revival of the musical play I Remember Mama. The show underwent numerous revisions during a long preview period, then closed after 108 performances. She also starred in the nearly universally panned film remake of Lost Horizon in 1973.

Ullmann's first film as a director was Sofie (1992), in which she directed her friend and former co-star, Erland Josephson. She went on to direct the Bergman-penned Faithless (2000) and reprise her role from Scenes from a Marriage in Saraband (2003), Bergman's final telemovie. Faithless garnered nominations for both the Palme d'Or and Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival.

In 1984, she chaired the jury at the 34th Berlin International Film Festival, and in 2002 chaired the jury of Cannes Film Festival. She introduced her daughter, Linn Ullmann, to the audience with the words: "Here comes the woman whom Ingmar Bergmann loves the most". Her daughter was there to receive the Prize of Honour on behalf of her father; she would return to take a place on the jury herself in 2011.

In 2006, Ullmann announced that she had been forced to give up on her dream of making a film based on A Doll's House. According to her statement, the Norwegian Film Fund was blocking her and writer Kjetil Bjørnstad from pursuing the project. Australian actress Cate Blanchett and British actress Kate Winslet had been cast intended in the lead roles in the movie. She later directed Blanchett in the play A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams, at the Sydney Theatre Company in Sydney, Australia, which ran September through October 2009, and then continued from 29 October to 21 November 2009 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., where it won a Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Non-resident Production as well as actress and supporting performer for 2009. The play was also mounted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, New York.

Ullmann narrated the Canada–Norway co-produced animated short film The Danish Poet (2006), which won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film at the 79th Academy Awards in 2007.

On 10 December 2010, Ullmann participated in the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony. She read "I have no Enemies," the words of 2010 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo, a human-rights advocate imprisoned in China. In Liu's absence, the medal and diploma were placed on an empty chair on the stage.

She published two autobiographies, Changing (1977) and Choices (1984).

In the late 1970s, she became a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.

In 2012, she attended the International Indian Film Academy Awards in Singapore, where she was honored her for Outstanding Contributions to International Cinema and she also showed her film on her relationship with Ingmar Bergman.