Lindfors, Viveca (1920–1995)

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Lindfors, Viveca (1920–1995)

Swedish-born actress with an international reputation. Born Elsa Viveka Torstensdotter Lindfors on December 29, 1920, in Uppsala, Sweden; died on October 25, 1995, in Uppsala; one of three children, two girls and a boy, of Torsten Lindfors (a book publisher) and Karin (Dymling) Lindfors (a painter); graduated from the Lyceum School, Stockholm; attended the Royal Dramatic Theater School, Stockholm, 1937–40; married Harry Hasso (a cinematographer), in 1941 (divorced); married Folke Rogard (a lawyer), in 1946 (divorced 1949); married Don Siegel (a director), in 1949 (divorced 1953); married George Tabori (a novelist, playwright, and director), in 1954 (divorced 1972); children: (first marriage) John Hasso; (second marriage) Lena Rogard ; (third marriage) Kristoffer Tabori (an actor).

Selected theater:

made her stage debut in Anne Sophie Hedvig (Royal Dramatic Theater School, 1937); at the Royal Dramatic Theater, Stockholm, appeared in French Without Tears (1940), as the Bride in Blood Wedding (1943), and Olivia in Twelfth Night (1945); made her Broadway debut as Inez Cabral in I've Got Sixpence (Ethel Barrymore Theater, December 1952); made her London debut as Sophia in The White Countess (Saville Theater, March 1954); appeared as Anna in Anastasia (Lyceum Theater, New York, December 1954, and subsequent tour), Cordelia in King Lear (New York City Center, January 1956), the title role in Miss Julie and Missy in The Stronger (Phoenix Theater, New York, February 1956); touredU.S. and South America as Catherine in Suddenly Last Summer (1961); in Stockholm, played in Brecht on Brecht (1963); appeared as Portia in The Merchant of Venice (Berkshire, Massachusetts Theater Festival, July 1966), Alice in Dance of Death (Arena Stage, Washington, D.C., fall 1970); appeared in one-woman show I Am a Woman (1972–73, and tour).

Filmography in Sweden:

The Spinning Family (1940); If I Should Marry the Minister (1941); In Paradise (1941); The Yellow Ward (1942); Anna Lans (1943); Appassionata (1944); Black Roses (1945); Marie in the Windmill (1945); In the Waiting Room of Death (Interlude, 1946). In the United States, unless otherwise noted: To the Victor (1948); Adventures of Don Juan (1948); Night Unto Night (1949); Singoalla (Sw./Fr., 1950); Backfire (1950); No Sad Songs for Me (1950); This Side of the Law (1950); Dark City (1950); Die Vier im Jeep (Four in a Jeep, Switz., 1951); The Flying Missile (1951); Journey Into Light (1951); The Raiders (1952); No Time for Flowers (1952); Run for Cover (1955); Moonfleet (1955); The Halliday Brand (1957); I Accuse! (UK, 1958); La Tempesta (The Tempest, It./Fr./Yug., 1958); The Story of Ruth (1960); King of Kings (1961); The Damned (These Are the Damned, UK, 1961); Huis Clos (No Exit, Arg./US, 1962); An Affair of the Skin (1963); Sylvia (1965); Brainstorm (1965); Coming Apart (1969); Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1971); Cauldron of Blood (US/Sp., 1971); The Way We Were (1973); La Casa sin Fronteras (Sp., 1972); Welcome to L.A. (1977); Tabu (Taboo, Sw., 1977); Girlfriends (1978); A Wedding (1978); Voices (1979); Natural Enemies (1979); The Hand (1981); Creepshow (1982); Silent Madness (1984); The Sure Thing (1985); (also directed) Unfinished Business (1987); Rachel River (1987); Goin' to Chicago (1990); Luba (Holl., 1990); The Exorcist III (1990); Zandalee (1991); North of Pittsburgh (1992); The Linguine Incident (1992); Stargate (1994); Last Summer in the Hamptons (1995).

A tall brunette, often referred to as Garboesque, Swedish actress Viveka Lindfors (changed to Viveca when she was nine and first decided to be a performer) was born in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1920. She grew up in a traditional middle-class Swedish family and graduated from the Lyceum School for girls in Stockholm. At 16, having decided on an acting career, she passed the grueling three-day audition and was accepted at the Royal Dramatic Theater School, where she made her acting debut in Anne Sophie Hedvig, playing a young schoolgirl who witnesses a murder by her teacher and confronts her. After graduating in 1940, Lindfors continued with the Royal Dramatic Theater for two years, performing in classical and modern plays, while honing her craft. Though still with the theater, she took a five-line walk-on in the film The Crazy Family, which led to a starring role in If I Should Marry the Minister (1941), a movie that launched her career in cinema. A string of stage and film roles followed, including the movie Appassionata (1944), which caught the attention of the American agent Kay Brown . Brown brought the stunning young actress to America in 1946, under contract to Warner Bros.

Leaving her two young children in Sweden (one with her first husband, cinematographer Harry Hasso), Lindfors arrived in Hollywood with her second husband, lawyer Folke Rogard, and spent close to six months without an assignment from Warner Bros. In her first American film, Night Unto Night (not released until 1949), she appeared opposite established star Ronald Reagan and was directed by Don Siegel, who would become Lindfors' third husband. After making four movies, none of which advanced her career, the actress became discouraged and expressed her bitterness in a layout in Life magazine. As a result, Warner Bros. dropped her option, after which she freelanced and spent part of her time in Europe. Just before leaving for Stockholm to make Singoalla (1950), the actress accepted a second lead in Columbia's No Sad Songs for Me (1950), a role that some called her finest effort in American films to date. Of her subsequent movies, the best were the multilingual Swiss film Die Vier im Jeep (Four in a Jeep, 1951) and No Exit (1962), both of which earned the actress acting honors at the Berlin Film Festival.

Many believe that Lindfors reached her high point as an actress on the stage rather than in films. She moved to New York in the early 1950s and made her Broadway debut in John Van Druten's I've Got Sixpence (1952). Her breakthrough performance, however, was in Anastasia, which opened in New York on her 33rd birthday, December 29, 1959. Co-starring with Eugénie Leontovich , who was brilliant in the role of the Dowager Empress, Lindfors, as Anastasia , the only supposed surviving member of the tsar's family, was remarkable in her transformation from a waif to a regal presence. Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times (December 30, 1954) praised the climactic recognition scene between Leontovich and Lindfors as "two pieces of acting that came out of the theater's treasure chest."

Lindfors went on to perform in classic plays by Shakespeare, Brecht, and Tennessee Williams, all the while keeping her film career on track. In 1966, following an idyllic summer of stock in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts, Lindfors and her fourth husband George Tabori founded the Berkshire Theater Festival in Stockbridge, where she served as the assistant artistic director. Following a successful first season, during which they presented The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder, The Cretan Woman by Robinson Jeffers, The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare, and Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, Lindfors and Tabori fell victims to an unsavory scheme to unseat them and lost the festival project. Soon after, Lindfors organized her own company of five actors, The Strolling Players, which toured college campuses throughout the United States for three years.

Lindfors' personal life, which included four tumultuous marriages and numerous love affairs, was complicated by her inability to merge the traditional role of wife and mother with that of an independent actress who lived to work and wanted desperately to make a difference in the world. "Those two images, far apart in their goals, in a constant tug of war with each other, left me, the real woman, neglected, frustrated, ambivalent, and incapable of open and lasting intimacy," she wrote in the introduction to her autobiography, Viveka … Viveca. Born of this struggle to reconcile the various parts of her personality was her one-woman show I Am a Woman (1972–73), a compilation of works by, for, and about women, which she created over a six-month period in 1971 with her friend, director Paul Austin.

"Woman + Actress = Me," she wrote under the title in the published version of the play. "I was in a dilemma," she wrote. "A dilemma fabricated by society leading to a neurosis of my own. A dilemma I could no longer stomach. A dilemma that led to conflicts in my marriage as well as my work. And so the play came from many sources, many needs, spiritual, psychological, as well as realistic." The show, which contained such diverse material as a reading from the original diary of Anne Frank and the introduction of Lillian Hellman 's Pentimento, opened at the Seattle Repertory Theater in 1972 to splendid reviews and played to full houses. In Washington, D.C., however, Lindfors was greeting with a particularly nasty review from a Washington Post critic who attacked the actress personally for her sagging breasts, her age, and her Swedish accent. Though unnerved by the review, Lindfors was heartened when subsequent audiences came to her defense, sending letters to the editor and

even organizing a picket line in front of the newspaper's offices. "In Washington, D.C., sisterhood became a practical reality to me," she wrote later. The show subsequently enjoyed a four-month run at Gene Frankel's Theater of Space in New York City, and toured theaters and college campuses across the country for years. Lindfors also performed the show abroad, including in her native Sweden.

Viveca Lindfors continued to act throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, and in 1987 both acted in and directed the film Unfinished Business…. She had just completed the movie Last Summer in the Hamptons (1995) and had returned to her home in Uppsala, Sweden, to tour in the play In Search of Strindberg, when she died of complications from rheumatoid arthritis. She was 74.