(4 of 10)
Trying to make up for their father's death, Janna built up for her daughters a fantasy father, someone who would always protect them when they were in trouble. Already hyperimaginative, Liv recalls, she would write "long letters to my father in heaven, telling him all my thoughts, or pleading with him to come back." Whenever she saw a Norwegian airman in the street, she would chase him down to see if he were her father. Both mother and daughter would later regret this overemphasis on an omnipotent male figure.
Homely and flat-chested, or so she thought, Liv was a miserable teen-ager with no friends, male or female. At the beach she kept her shoes on to hide what she rather obsessively regarded as ugly toes. At dancing school she was devastated when the boys picked everyone but her for partners. "I was such a catastrophe," she remembers with lingering bitterness. "I was nothing. I would never make it."
The Best Roles. One day a girl sat down beside her at the school snack bar and chatted with her briefly. The girl probably thought nothing of it, but for months Liv returned to the same table in hopes that the girl would appear again. She never did. "You never get away from these things," Liv says. "Whatever happens to me now has that for a background."
To compensate for her unhappiness she turned to books and religion. She still reads voraciously, and though she prefers to pick up an Agatha Christie between takes on the set, her taste off the set is more serious: Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing. When she was not reading she was writing religious plays, some based on Bible stories and all appropriately gloomy and tragic. "They were all about people hoping for miracles," she says. "Of course I wrote all the best roles for myself."
Spoken like an actress. Even then Liv was nursing her ambition. "I thought secretly to myself that I would show them," she says. At 17 she told her mother that she wanted to go to England to study acting. Mama, more than a little reluctant, admitted her misgivings to a psychiatrist. "Are you thinking of your own happiness or Liv's?" he asked. "That was enough," remembers Janna Ullmann. "I paid the bill and we left."
Whatever eight months in a London drama school did for Liv, it did not equip her to pass her audition for the state theater school in Oslo (no talent, said the examiners). Liv went instead to the repertory Theater in the small (pop. 82,000) city of Stavanger, where she landed the lead in The Diary of Anne Frank. For the first time in her life her reviews were raves. "It was a lovely part," she says. "You couldn't miss. The theater really belonged to you. I was truly lucky. It will never be that way again." But it almost was, both in Stavanger and eventually in Oslo. Liv's only complaint was that the roles were all as heavy as the religious epics she used to write for herself. "Strange," she muses, "When I began I somehow thought I was a comedienne. But instead I was always the tragic heroine or the unhappy woman who loses her lover."