Liv Ullmann can make conflicting feelings legible with scarcely a change of expression. We value her most when that openness makes a difficult woman recognisable without asking us to excuse her, as in Cries and Whispers.
Fi1m perspective
Watch how little Liv Ullmann needs to change in a close-up: a glance, a small movement of the face, and a feeling becomes difficult to hide. Ingmar Bergman's close-ups make room for that precision. In Cries and Whispers (1972), her Maria brings ordinary family discomfort into a severe film about care. We rate her highly for making a character understandable even when her behaviour is hard to excuse.
Their collaboration began with Persona (1966), the breakthrough that established her international reputation. Her Marianne in Scenes from a Marriage (1973) brought that psychological attention to a television miniseries about marital breakdown. Autumn Sonata (1978) put her Eva opposite Ingrid Bergman in a mother-daughter confrontation. These parts demand an ability to show conflicting feelings, and Ullmann's small gestures are particularly well suited to them.
Maria is especially persuasive alongside Ingrid Thulin's Karin. The two performances give the sisters' estrangement the awkwardness of a family whose members cannot manage tenderness towards one another. We were unsettled by Cries and Whispers because those failures of care felt familiar. Ullmann makes us stay with Maria's discomfort long enough to understand it, without suggesting that understanding obliges us to forgive her.
There is a limit to what even this acting can repair. Bergman's writing draws an overly neat distinction between the sisters and Kari Sylwan's Anna, the maid who offers the clearest example of compassion. Maria and Karin risk being reduced to their inability to care. Ullmann and Thulin make the women seem more complicated than that, though they cannot remove the problem from the writing.
She later directed Bergman's screenplays for Private Confessions (1996) and Faithless (2000). Miss Julie (2014) continued that work behind the camera, but the acting remains our reason to return to her films. Start with Cries and Whispers, provided you are prepared for its severity.
Biography
Liv Ullmann is a Norwegian actress and filmmaker. She was born Liv Johanne Ullmann on 16 December 1938 in Tokyo, Japan, to Norwegian parents.
Ullmann is best known for her extensive collaborations with director Ingmar Bergman, appearing as Elisabet Vogler in Persona (1966), Alma Borg in Hour of the Wolf (1968), Eva Rosenberg in Shame (1968), Anna Fromm in The Passion of Anna (1969), Maria in Cries and Whispers (1972), Marianne in Scenes from a Marriage (1973), and Eva in Autumn Sonata (1978). She also appeared in A Bridge Too Far (1977).
She won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama for The Emigrants (1971) and received Academy Award nominations for that film and Face to Face (1976). In 2022 she was presented with an Honorary Academy Award.
