When Bergman was dying on Fårö, Ullmann traveled from her cottage in Norway to see him. He died soon after she arrived, but she made sure to tell him, “You called for me.” Says Ullmann, “I got to say goodbye to him. I don’t know if he knew I was there, but it was important for me.”
She still longs to do her first comedy and says Bergman kept promising to write her one. But it’s doubtful there will be many laughs when she plays the drug-addled Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night at the National Theatre in Oslo in 2010. She’s excited about returning to her roots on the Norwegian stage after a 39-year absence and even about touring the north of the country by bus with the production, something she hasn’t done since she was a fledgling actress. “It will be wonderful,” she says with girlish glee. “A kind of return and farewell. I will have come full circle.”
