Ulla Jacobsson gives her innocent young women warmth and a hint of sadness. We particularly value her alertness in Smiles of a Summer Night, where she holds her place in a forceful ensemble without overplaying.
Fi1m perspective
In Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), Ulla Jacobsson plays Anne Egerman as someone alert to the people around her. She is the young wife in Ingmar Bergman's romantic comedy, and innocence could easily be all the part required of her. We warmed to Anne because Jacobsson makes her attentive, giving us something to notice beyond her youth. We recommend the performance, and the film, with a small reservation about the comedy's fondness for elaborate complications.
Her breakthrough, as Kerstin in Arne Mattsson's One Summer of Happiness (1951), had already established innocence as central to her screen image. Warmth and a suggestion of sadness gave that image more feeling than the label of ingénue allows. But the attention paid to the film's brief nude scene made it difficult to escape, and subsequent attempts to repeat its appeal were generally unsuccessful. That history is worth remembering when judging the later parts: repeated casting as an innocent tells us only so much about what an actress can do.
Bergman's ensemble benefits from the differences between its actors. Margit Carlqvist gives Countess Charlotte Malcolm's humour a bite, while Jarl Kulle plays Count Carl Magnus Malcolm more broadly. Jacobsson does not need to imitate either approach; her alertness helps keep the comedy from becoming a succession of people delivering the same kind of clever performance. Eva Dahlbeck and Harriet Andersson remain particular pleasures, so recommending Jacobsson here need not mean pretending the film belongs to her alone.
From the late 1950s, her work moved mainly into German, British and French productions, with occasional American films. Her later English-language characters tended to be serious and anxious, a narrower use of the warmth associated with her early work. Zulu (1964) and The Heroes of Telemark (1965) belong to that international phase. Fox and His Friends (1975), directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, gave her a later supporting part. Start with Smiles of a Summer Night, but go for the company as much as for Jacobsson.
Biography
Ulla Jacobsson was a Swedish actress who trained at the Gothenburg city theatre school and began her career on stage in the early 1950s. She gained international attention for her role in One Summer of Happiness (1951).
Jacobsson played Anne Egerman in Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night (1955). Other notable roles include Margareta Witt in Zulu (1964), Anna Pedersen in The Heroes of Telemark (1965) and Eugen's mother in Fox and His Friends (1975). She won the German Film Award for Supporting Actress for Alle Jahre wieder (1967).
She moved to Vienna after marrying Austrian ethnologist Hans Winfried Rohsmann and died there in 1982.
