It was like watching Minnie Mouse play Ophelia—brilliantly. Nobody could believe that Ann-Margret, the Swedish meatball, the female Troy Donahue, the 30-year-old high school cheerleader from Wilmette, Ill., was actually acting. But in Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge (TIME, July 5), playing the billowy milkbed the hero frolics on, she opposed Jack Nicholson's grim portrait of a swordless swordsman with a rich and touching study of what happens to a woman when her man won't let her be one. Her work deserved and got the sort of reviews that could win a girl an Oscar, and her body got a degree and quality of exposure that made her overnight what for eleven years she has clumsily tried to be: a sex symbol. In the past six months, thanks to a sudden ripening of her stage personality, Ann-Margret has made herself a smash hit at the International in Las Vegas and has outdrawn Frank Sinatra at Miami Beach's Fontainebleau.
Cat-Sized Rats. With every reason to feel just great, why did she look so puffy and strung out? "I'm flabbergasted by the reviews," she told TIME'S Brad Darrach. "After eleven years, I can't believe it. But you know, doing that part —it changed my life." Her voice broke. "It made me realize. So much. That poor girl I played in the picture had been so used. Always attracted to the same kind of man, and each man destroyed her. She was like a little puppy dog. No matter how much you beat her she kept coming back, trusting the owner. Since I did the part, I've been feeling so much tension, such pressure." She drew a deep breath. "It's a definite signal. I'll work through the year because I've got commitments. Then I'll quit show business. At least for a year, maybe forever."
Forever in show business usually lasts till the next good offer, but success and disillusion do seem to have struck Ann-Margret simultaneously. Her story, which she told like a woman who had just discovered pain and was fascinated by it, is a version of the old standard about the small-town girl who paid too high a price to reach the big time. When Ann-Margret Olsson was a year old, her electrician father left his family in a tiny Swedish village and sailed for the U.S. For the next seven years, until his wife reluctantly agreed to follow him, Ann-Margret was her mother's main source of happiness. It was a heavy responsibility. "As early as I can remember," she says now, "the thing I thought about most of all was giving people happiness."
In Wilmette, the family fell on hard times and took cheap lodgings in a funeral parlor. Ann-Margret slept on a foldout bed in the room where the bodies were laid out. When there was a funeral, she could not go to bed until the last mourner had left; she was often wakened, she says, by rats as big as full-grown cats that (for reasons perhaps best left unexamined) lived in the mortuary cellar. At 16, Ann-Margret sang on Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour but lost out to "a Mexican leaf player," and at 19 she turned up in Las Vegas. She had a firecracker energy and a hot, staccato style that could take your eye off a charging tiger.