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Nor is it legitimate to speak of Bergman's players merely as actors. People like Von Sydow and Björnstrand have been with him for over a decade. What the Moscow Art Theater was to Stanislavsky, these performers are to Bergman—ensemble members who function like fingers on a hand. Liv Ullman, newest member of the troupe, is, astonishingly, the best, portraying a whole range of feminine response, from molten eroticism to glacial hate. At the end of his life, Freud wrote: "The great question, which I have not been able to answer despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'" Ullman supplies no answer, but no other actress could have rephrased the question so well.
Scandinavian tourists troop off the ferry with light portable ladders to prop against the high stone wall. Sheep Island is a long way from Stockholm, the wind is bitter, and the wall is high. But to them the object is worth the search—a glimpse of Bergman and what Swedes euphemize as his latest "little home companion." If they are lucky, they can see a brilliant glint of strawberry blonde hair and the planed face with its saddle of freckles and wistful smile.
For Bergman, 50, such liaisons are nothing new; he has been married four times, and his name is a favorite with Scandinavian rumormongers. But for Liv Ullman, 29, the aspect of scandal is unfamiliar. Born in Tokyo of Norwegian parents, she later went to Canada, where her aircraft-engineer father was fatally injured in a landing-field accident. Resettled in Norway, she developed a single obsession: to be an actress. She dropped out of high school, convinced that she could meet the lofty standards of Oslo's National Theater School. When they refused her, she stubbornly set off for London for eight months of intense acting lessons. They were enough to give her the sheen and technique she lacked.
Sealed Inside. Back in Norway, Ullman joined a provincial troupe, not long afterward became a member of the prestigious National Theater of Norway and married an Oslo psychiatrist, Hans Stang. By the time she was 26, she was a major stage actress in her own country, with four films to her credit. But her fame remained sealed inside Norway until Bergman, struck by the resemblance between Ullman and his longtime star, Bibi Andersson, (The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries) offered her a role in his study of personality transference, Persona. Radiant over her success as an actress and her selection by Bergman, she told the Stockholm press: "I am a very happy girl. I had two great wishes in my life, and they both came true. There is nothing left to want."