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With success came friends, and in 1960 Liv married Oslo Psychiatrist Hans Jacob Stang, five years her senior. Not, of course, that she approved of her husband's profession, which—good Calvinist that she is—she makes sound somewhat like bootlegging. "Psychiatry is quite dangerous for people," she insists sternly, "especially in America, where I think everyone is indulging himself too much. There are two ways to really learn about yourself. One is to just sit and think and the other is to go out of yourself and try to find out why you fail and why you succeed—and what you should do to be a better person. I had a lot of failures, and I started to understand that it couldn't be only other people who were doing wrong things to me. It had to be something inside myself. I started to find out what was wrong with me."
What, in fact, was wrong with her? "I discovered that I had been brought up to be the sort of person people wanted me to be," she says, "so that they would like me and I would not be uncomfortable for them. That person wasn't me at all, because nobody really asked who I was. I wanted to be me, and when I started to be me I felt I had more to give. I found it more interesting to live."
No longer the awkward, intensely lonely teenager, she met Ingmar Bergman, who was for five years, and in many ways still is, the most important person in her life. Bergman had known of her work, and one day in Stockholm he saw her as she was walking down the street with her friend Bibi Andersson, one of Bergman's brightest stars. Liv was almost dumbstruck but remembers the short scene better than any other she has ever played. "He said: 'Would you like to be in one of my pictures?' I blushed and said: 'Of course.' " The image of the two women together struck a chord in Bergman's mind, and a year later he called them to the remote Baltic island of Fårö, where he has a home and often makes his films, to shoot Persona.
He Was God. "On this island," says Liv in her straightforward way, "I fell in love with Ingmar. My husband and I had had five good years together, but the marriage had failed. I saw later that I had expected my husband to give me the marriage. I thought that marriage was made to serve me, make me happy and give me a husband who protected and took care of me. I learned that it should be something between two equal human beings who help and guide each other. It can't be good when the woman is some sort of clinging flower who sits waiting for her man to bring happiness home."
Her relationship with Bergman was not an equation of equals either; Bergman, probably more than Stang, was the fantasy father to whom she had once written letters. "To me," she says, "he was God. I admired him so much, and I was scared to death of him. I was only 25—too young—and he was 46. When he spoke, I blushed. I remember that he was worried the first week of shooting Persona. But he trusts the people he picks, and the moment you open up he will be there to help."