She feels lucky to have been “seen,” as she puts it, by Bergman, who she says often used her in his work as his alter ego. (He even intended for her to play the mother in his Oscar-winning Fanny & Alexander, but she turned him down to do a Norwegian film, a decision she regrets.) “In most partnerships, you never get to have a complete understanding of the other person and use it creatively,” she says. “And he did that with me, even if he stole some of my life for Scenes From a Marriage.” Recently she discovered that for a devastating scene in which the husband falls asleep while his trusting wife reads her diary to him, Bergman had taken the words directly from a journal she had left for him to read while they were living together. “It made me cry when I realized it,” she says. “I had no idea.”
Given Bergman’s long shadow, Ullmann says she once worried that “I’m nothing outside of him,” but eventually came to see how she stood out on her own. She raised their daughter, now an acclaimed novelist and one of Norway’s leading journalists; starred on stages around the world; and worked as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, later cofounding an organization for refugee women and children. These days she divides her time among Oslo, Boston, and Key Largo, Florida, and reportedly lives with Donald Saunders, the Boston real-estate developer she married in 1985, divorced a decade later and reconciled with the day after the papers were signed. (Though Ullmann refuses to discuss him, Saunders accompanies her to today’s interview.)
In 1992 Ullmann turned to directing and freely admits that she drew on many of Bergman’s lessons, “mainly that you can play, use fantasies, everything you did as a child,” she says, noting that she never valued how creative she’d been in front of the camera until she moved behind it.
“Even though she has this vast body of work and a depth of experience that’s almost unparalleled,” says Blanchett, “she’s still able to keep that sense of wonder alive in her work.” Streetcar, Blanchett points out, “sits in the shadow” of the 1951 film version starring Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh: “You have to remove all the preconceptions and clichéd relationships one has to it and come to it fresh. I can’t imagine any other director doing that as fearlessly as Liv has done.”
Ullmann’s first two features were lavish period pieces, but she achieved international renown as a director when she tackled two Bergman-penned screenplays, both drawn from his life. Private Confessions (1996) looked at the unhappy marriage of Bergman’s parents, and Faithless (2000) at the destruction wrought by a woman’s affair with her husband’s best friend. Faithless starred Ullmann’s Scenes From a Marriage costar Erland Josephson, and between takes, the two old friends would joke around as their former characters, Marianne and Johan, imagining them demented 30 years later. “We shot a few scenes [of themselves as Marianne and Johan] and sent the footage to Ingmar, and he loved it,” she says. “But after a year there came this script, and it wasn’t funny anymore. It was as dark as any movie he made.” The resulting TV film, Saraband (2003), was Bergman’s last. Ullmann reprised her role as Marianne, who visits her ex at his summer home after 30 years apart. When he asks why she has come, she replies, “You called for me.” “I just loved that,” says Ullmann.
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