 |
| Liv Ullmann on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl: “It’s so inspiring to me!” Photo: Ed Bahlman |
In the second instalment with Liv Ullmann we discussed her 1973 Best Actress in a Leading Role Academy Award nomination for her performance in Jan Troell’s The Emigrants; writer Tove Ditlevsen; being 13 and also very grown up at the same time; Some Like it Hot on Broadway, starring Christian Borle and J Harrison Ghee and Billy Wilder’s film with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, directing Faithless, screenplay by Ingmar Bergman (starring Lena Endre and Erland Josephson) and forgiving yourself, and being nervous with Laurence Olivier when they starred in A Bridge Too Far, directed by Richard Attenborough.
Liv Ullmann was in New York for two DOC NYC selections, Dheeraj Akolkar’s all-embracing Liv Ullmann: A Road Less Travelled (a highlight of the 14th edition) where Cate Blanchett, Jessica Chastain, Lena Endre, Jeremy Irons, Sam Waterston, and John Lithgow all pay tribute to her and as an executive producer with Wim Wenders (his Anselm in 3D was also shown) on Margreth Olin’s Songs Of Earth.
 |
| Liv Ullmann was Oscar-nominated for Jan Troell’s The Emigrants |
Anne-Katrin Titze: We all have our vanities and I like how in the documentary you describe your complete conviction that you would be accepted into the acting school.
Liv Ullmann: I know! And I was! But it wasn’t a shock to me [to not be accepted], because I had my grandmother I could go to, and sleep with her at night; and she held me and I was fine.
AKT: Not many people admit those things. The Academy Awards and everybody telling you, you’re going to win, you’re going to get it for The Emigrants.
LU: Right.
AKT: These are emotions you express that many people tend to hide. Disappointments are private and people are afraid of these moments that we all have.
LU: But you see, there’s always something good, because not winning an Academy Award, of course, at the moment you go, oh! But then you come to the hotel room and my sewing circle left a letter for me on my pillow: “We think you are best!” We all have it - I can hear I sound like I’m 20, but that’s okay.
AKT: There’s a quote in the film: “There is a young girl in me that refuses to die.”
LU: Yes, that is by a writer, Tove Ditlevsen, very famous in the North, at least. She actually committed suicide, but she wrote in one of her books “There is a young girl in me who refuses to die.” And it’s the truth. I am 13, but I am also very grown-up. And I know how to handle things. I know how to take care when I’m supposed to take care. But I like the 13-year-old and I allow her to live.
 |
| Liv Ullmann was Oscar-nominated for Ingmar Bergman's Face To Face |
You see, if you speak with people that way, I was in Lübeck also now for this movie [Liv Ullmann: A Road Less Travelled] and I met young people in a salon, and they were all debutantes, all either photographing or with a film or something, and we talked about shyness. As it turned out, they are all shy, they are all scared, they are all having this armor on. And if you say, but I am 13, suddenly they are all something like seven years old. We need that!
AKT: Totally. And we don’t need to ever kill that part of ourself. That’s why I noticed the sentence, because people often think that when we grow up this part is dead. My grandmother never really grew up, the one who told me about The Little Match Girl. I could see the child in her into her nineties. It connects to what women are allowed to do and not allowed. Girls for a long time were allowed more rebelliousness than women, a certain wildness, à la Pippi Longstocking, that for women still is more difficult.
LU: It’s more difficult. For my generation, I think, it was even more difficult to be allowed. I know, because I got a child [Linn] out of wedlock. I know my mother suffered very much because my father was dead and his family wrote to her and said, it’s good he’s dead. In ways that wouldn’t happen today. They were not bad people either but it was a shame. I didn’t find a priest to christen her, I’m a Christian, because they wouldn’t do that before she was three years old. In certain ways, young people, and I was young, were allowed less than today. I saw this play here, which made an incredible impression on me. I saw Some Like It Hot and it’s what you are allowed to do and not allowed to do. I saw the movie, Some Like It Hot, with Jack Lemmon.
AKT: Yes, Billy Wilder.
LU: I like the movie and everything. Now I was in the theatre, and I saw the two men who had to escape from being murdered, dressed as women. And suddenly it was about something else. Because one of them fell in love with one of the women in the chorus and I could see them watch his face looking at her. And I see an incredible actor, a man in women’s clothes, and he didn’t look in the face like any kind of man. He had to hide it and at the same time the actor showed his love in the face for the woman. And then the other one, he/she had such happiness. Oh god, I loved him the way he was, how he loved being a woman.
 |
| Liv Ullmann received an Honorary Oscar in 2022 |
And then all the murderers were killed and then they are together and the one who is in love with a woman is going, we have to undress, we have to undress [out of the women’s garb], and you could feel he thinks, I will now be able to go to her! These are feelings you never see in that movie, but suddenly the whole audience is feeling that he’s going to declare himself. And then the other one, more than any kind of talk or speeches that people are making, says, No, no, I finally feel like I am me! The day I was there, the whole audience got up and said hurrah. And I cannot forget it. He was an incredible actor but at the same time he was talking of what it really is and what nobody understands before you see it and feel it.
AKT: It sounds like one of those deeply profound experiences theatre can give us.
LU: Incredible!
AKT: I want to go see it now! You totally convinced me.
LU: You haven’t seen it? But you have to make sure it’s the same actors!
AKT: I want to talk about Faithless and the act of forgiving yourself!
LU: I forgive myself but I have a problem because I can get so many angry thoughts. Also traveling in Florence I was talking to the head of the [Florence International Film] Festival [Costantino Maiani] about this and he said: it’s so easy, when bad things come into my brain, I say, okay stay, you came to me, I love you, you belong to me. And he started loving, not the bad thoughts, but that the thoughts were there and to take care of them.
 |
| Lena Endre and Erland Josephson in Liv Ullmann's Faithless |
AKT: It’s difficult.
LU: Yeah, but I think it is possible. You have to be aware. And in Faithless, unfortunately, I wanted this man to forgive himself for a woman he really had been bad to when she was young. He took her away from her husband and the child and then he left her in a very bad way. Ingmar wrote it and gave it to me because for whatever reason he didn’t want to do it. I called him before I did it and I said, you have to write something where the man forgives himself, because he’s not going to be able to live on. “No, no, no, no.”
But I said, “Ingmar, it’s about you.” “No, it’s not about me.” I said, “Ingmar, the old man, you call him Bergman.The young man, you call him Bergman. It’s you!” “No. And you are not allowed to write something!” Then I thought it was a genius idea, because in the script the young man is sitting by the mirror and saying to himself what he did and it was wrong and it was terrible. Whatever, she deserves it. I don’t remember, it’s years ago. I took him away from the mirror, because I can have my own scenery, Ingmar wasn’t there. And he comes in the workroom to the old man, to old Bergman, and then he tells the whole story.
AKT: It’s an incredible scene.
LU: He tells everything, then comes the forgiveness. The old man, who heard everything, he reaches out and he does that [Liv stretches out her hand and touches my cheek softly]. I was so proud! And Ingmar, when I was finished and had edited it, saw it and “Hmh, no.” And that’s this.
AKT: Laurence Olivier once confided in you that he had a similar feeling as you and that he thought he couldn’t act anymore? That he was overwhelmed.
LU: It’s everything. You know, people expect so much when you are Laurence Olivier and when you had great success. But he told me because I forgot my words. I was so nervous, I’m acting with Laurence Olivier! And he was just the sweetest nice person. Actually the way I was with the people in the salon in Lübeck, when they were all shy.
 |
| Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot |
I had it happen to me that an old person suddenly said, it’s fine to be shy. I got security from him and I did my part, which wasn’t too big. We do experience as young what young people experience now and we recognise it when we are old. And somewhere there I want to do something. And now you said that with the girl with the matches to me. I don’t know in what way it’s so inspiring to me!
AKT: We always think that other people have it more together, are more in control. That someone else’s life is so perfectly done while I’m such a mess.
LU: Exactly! I never feel I’m a mess, I don’t, because I don’t mess around. And I’m not enormously ambitious. It just happens to me all the time. But what I do feel is I’m a nobody. You know, if they really knew, I’m absolutely a nobody. And I know that’s not true.
AKT: It’s definitely not true.
LU: But I have to talk to myself and my ugly thoughts are coming when I feel that people talk for me, instead of allowing me to talk. And when people answer for me instead of allowing me to answer.
AKT: That’s a woman thing again, that somebody thinks they can just take over.
LU: Exactly. But you see, I think it’s only me. You know, “what she really means…”. It’s stupid, because I’m really good at planning and knowing everything. Maybe not in five years, but right now I know I am.
Read what Liv Ullmann had to say on Liv Ullmann: A Road Less Travelled, Ingmar Bergman, Henrik Ibsen, Bertolt Brecht, and fairy tales.
