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Signe Hasso, the Swedish-born star of “A Double Life” whose stage and screen career spanned nine decades, died Friday June 7 of cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A. She was 86.
Born Signe Larsson, the classic blond actress began her career at 13 in a play at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm. She made her final TV appearance last year in a documentary about her friend and countrywoman, Greta Garbo.
At 16, Hasso became the youngest acting student in the history of the Royal Dramatic Theater. She worked steadily in European films and stage throughout the 1930s.
She married Harry Hasso and had a son, who would die in the mid-1950s in a motorcycle accident. In 1940, Hasso moved to Los Angeles and signed a contract with RKO. When that deal went nowhere, Hasso moved to New York to pursue a stage career.
In the mid-1940s, Hasso returned to Hollywood to sign with MGM, starring in a series of strong leading-lady parts. In 1947, she played opposite Ronald Colman in the acclaimed “A Double Life,” an exploration of an actor who becomes obsessed by his role as Othello. Hasso played Colman’s wife.
She made a number of films with top-flight directors during that period, including “The House on 92 Street” with Henry Hathaway, “The Seventh Cross” with Fred Zinneman and “Heaven Can Wait” with Ernst Lubitsch.
She continued to make films in Scandinavia and the United States into the 1950s, though her career began shifting toward television guest appearances as she aged.
Hasso also won praise and awards as a lyricist for Swedish folk songs and as a writer. She received the equivalent of a knighthood from the King of Sweden in 1972.
She is survived by one sister and three nieces.
