A natural, untrained actor who did his best work young and for one director, Eddie Axberg gave Jan Troell's films a restless, daydreaming boy to set against their patient men. He then went and worked the sound desk, which tells you something.
Fi1m perspective
In The Emigrants (1971), Robert is the one who leaves for the youngest reasons. His brother Karl Oskar goes because his field is mostly rock and his children are hungry; Robert goes because the farmer he works for hits him. Eddie Axberg plays him with a boy's daydreaming and a boy's bad luck, and he does it without appearing to act at all. Beside Max von Sydow, who has decided and will not discuss it again, Robert is all undecided, and the film needs him for that.
He had been at it since childhood, in radio and television from 1959, and had an uncredited part in Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light (1963). The role that made him was Olof Persson, the lead in Jan Troell's first feature, Here's Your Life (1966), a coming-of-age film with a working boy at its centre. Troell kept him on: Robert Nilsson in The Emigrants and again in The New Land (1972), the second half of the story taken from Vilhelm Moberg's novels. Three films with one director is most of the career anyone remembers, and Axberg has never seemed to mind.
What Troell got from him was a reserve with warmth underneath it, and a way of being on screen that does not look trained, because it was not. He was cast as young, working-class, restless men in period clothes, and he was good at them because he did not seem to be pretending. We will admit that in The Emigrants we were more anxious for Robert than for anyone else on the ship, and it was Axberg who did it, hopeful and half elsewhere in a film full of people who have stopped hoping and started enduring. The limit is plain: it is one kind of part, played young, for one director, and we have not seen him attempt anything else.
The odd thing is what he did afterwards, which was mostly not act. He has worked as a sound engineer since the 1960s, taking small parts now and then into the 2010s, and he has said that "he has never regarded himself as an actor but rather as a film technician". That is a strange thing for a man who led a feature before he was twenty to say, and it is also the best account we have of the performances: he stood in front of the camera like someone who did not think it was his job to perform. Start with The Emigrants, for the daydreamer. Then, if you can find it, Here's Your Life, where Troell first saw what he had.
Biography
Eddie Axberg is a Swedish actor and sound engineer. Born on 9 July 1947 in Stockholm, he began appearing in films and television in the early 1960s.
He is known for his performances as Olof in Här har du ditt liv (1966) and as Robert Nilsson in Jan Troell's The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972). For the latter roles he received the Guldbagge Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 1972. He has also worked extensively as a sound technician and mixer on numerous Swedish productions.
