Biography
Barbro Hiort af Ornäs (also credited as Barbara Hart) was a Swedish stage and film actress. Born on 28 August 1921 in Gothenburg, she trained at Schartau business school in Stockholm and began acting in the late 1930s, appearing in early productions associated with Ingmar Bergman. She made her film debut in 1943 and maintained a career spanning stage work at the Royal Dramatic Theatre (Dramaten) and numerous screen roles until the mid-2000s.
She appeared in several Bergman films, including Brink of Life (1958), in which she played Nurse Brita and shared the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival with Bibi Andersson, Eva Dahlbeck and Ingrid Thulin; All These Women (1964); Shame (1968); The Passion of Anna (1969); The Touch (1971); and Scenes from a Marriage (1973/1974) as Mrs Jacobi (uncredited). She received the Litteris et Artibus medal in 1989 for services to the arts. Later audiences knew her as Stig-Helmer’s mother in Lasse Åberg’s comedy films Snowroller (1985), Swedes at Sea (1988) and The Accidental Golfer (1991). Hiort af Ornäs died on 27 November 2015 in Stockholm.
