Gunnel Lindblom, a Swedish actress and director who played small, indelible roles in some of Ingmar Bergman’s most celebrated early films and then a central character in the once-scandalous “The Silence” (1963), died Jan. 24 at her home in Brottby, northeast of Stockholm. She was 89.
In Ms. Lindblom’s first movie for Bergman, she spoke only one line. She played a servant girl, described as mute, in “The Seventh Seal” (1957), Bergman’s international breakthrough.
The apocalyptic story, based on the Book of Revelation and set during the years of the Black Plague, tells of a Knight (Max von Sydow) who bargains desperately for more time to be alive with the character of Death by engaging him in a game of chess.
Such a contest can have only one ultimate outcome, of course, and as Death finally leads the Knight away, Ms. Lindblom’s character suddenly speaks with profound, prophetic conviction the words of one of Christ’s last utterances from the Cross — “It is finished.”
In Bergman’s next film, “Wild Strawberries” (1957), Ms. Lindblom played a gentle sister who mostly sat silently but alertly through a tearful narrative from the character of Sara (Bibi Andersson) at a family reunion. In “The Virgin Spring” (1960), Bergman’s first Oscar winner for best foreign-language film, she was an embittered servant who watches a brutal rape intently from afar. In “Winter Light” (1962), she played a heavily pregnant fisherman’s wife trying desperately to save her suicidal husband.
In all these films, the impact Ms. Lindblom made on audiences was in inverse proportion to her time on screen. “The Silence” gave Ms. Lindblom her first leading role, a performance of urgent sensuality that is contrasted against the repression and cold intellectualism of her dying sister (Ingrid Thulin).
“The Silence,” set amid a backdrop of sweltering heat and impending war in an unnamed European country, is one of Bergman’s most difficult films. It has all of his midcareer obsessions — angst, gloomy sex, Freudianism, existentialism, suppressed hysteria and heavy symbolism, punctuated by angry outbursts. It was a surprise financial success but also considered obscene and cut or suppressed altogether in some countries.
“Suddenly I was on scandalous headline posters in Germany with photo and all,” she recalled to the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter in 2016. “They were shocked by the movie’s sexual outspokenness. I remember I was caught off guard by the reactions.” She noted that there were already a lot of “porn-like movies” in European theaters coming out of Denmark, but because Bergman was considered a resolutely serious filmmaker cultural guardians “thought ‘enough is enough.’ ”
The Hollywood studio Twentieth Century Fox signed Ms. Lindblom to a contract, calling her “the Swedish Sophia Loren,” after the Italian actress who often played siren roles. Ms. Lindblom had a supporting part in the 1965 English-language melodrama “Rapture,” with Melvyn Douglas, Dean Stockwell and Patricia Gozzi. But she realized quickly that she liked neither the ways of Hollywood nor working away from Sweden.
And so she returned to Stockholm, where she joined the Royal Dramatic Theater (Dramaten) in 1968 and began to direct there in 1973. She said she wanted a more active part in the creative process: “Sometimes I’m stricken with panic that people won’t get to discover the reserves I have.”
Over time, she directed more than 25 productions at the theater and remained associated with the troupe until her last performances in “Oedipus/Antigone” in 2017, when she was in her mid-80s.
No fewer than four of Bergman’s leading female stars turned to directing. In addition to Ms. Lindblom, Thulin, Mai Zetterling and Liv Ullmann made their own films. Ms. Lindblom starred in two by Zetterling, “Loving Couples” (1964) and “The Girls” (1968).
“I have never been on the barricades waving a feminist flag, but always searched for stories about female experiences,” she told the Swedish paper in 2016. “I really don’t believe there is a particular ‘female eye’ behind the camera, it is all about choices, what stories you choose to tell.”
Gunnel Märtha Ingegärd Lindblom was born in Gothenburg on Dec. 18, 1931, and made her first appearances at the City Theater there. Her 1952 screen debut in “Kärlek” (Love) drew the attention of Bergman, who wanted to hire her for a theater he directed in Malmo.
As it happened, Ms. Lindblom had studied choreography with Bergman’s first wife, Else Fisher, in Gothenburg. “I was so angry because he had left her for another woman,” she said. “So when he came to a party I held in Malmo and tried to congratulate me, I shut the door in his face. He always used to remind me about this later on and laugh at my very unkind behavior.”
Nevertheless, he persuaded her, and she was especially celebrated for her appearances in “Peer Gynt” and “Faust.” “We had a fantastic time in Malmo,” she recalled to the London Observer after Bergman’s death in 2007. “There was a group of us for whom film and theater was everything. He was wonderful in the way he cared about the young people in theater and wanted to help them develop their talents.
“I was never afraid of him,” she continued. “I felt he really understood what I was trying to do. You didn’t have to show him something exquisite. He saw the work in progress and saw what it could become.”
She went on to play an important supporting role in “Scenes from a Marriage” (1973), originally made as a Swedish television series before its shortened cinematic release. In 2001, Ms. Lindblom traveled to the United States to appear in Bergman’s fourth and final production of August Strindberg’s “Ghost Sonata.”
Her marriages to Sture Helander, with whom she had three children, and to Frederik Dessau ended in divorce. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
In 1978, Ms. Lindblom bowed as a film director with “Summer Paradise.” Reviews were mixed, although most critics thought it a serious effort. “This is no modest, ungainly first flight,” Newsweek’s David Ansen wrote, calling it instead “an uncommonly ambitious attempt to evaluate the moral foundations of four generations of a bourgeois Swedish family as they gather at their traditional summer estate by the sea.” Her second film, “Sally and Freedom,” was released in 1981.
Ms. Lindblom was said be frustrated by the difficulties she had finding backers to bring her films to the screen and made only one more feature, “Summer Nights on the Planet Earth” (1987). She continued to work in television, and her 1991 telefilm “True Women” (1991) made it to theaters. One of her last movie appearances was in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” (2009), and she received late-life honors for her contributions to Swedish film.
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