Viveca Lindfors, actress, born Elsa V. Torstensdotter, born Uppsala,
Sweden, December 29, 1920, died, October 25, 1995
THE Swedish-born actress Viveca Lindfors, who has died in hospital in
her home town of Uppsala, went to Hollywood in 1947 following in the
footsteps of Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman, but somehow never quite
achieved their fame. ''I arrived too late to Hollywood,'' she said once.
''When I got there they were not interested in my kind of woman.''
But, truth to tell, she was not all that interested in Hollywood,
preferring to work in the theatre, particularly in the plays of Brecht
and Strindberg. But she did make some 40 films, mainly for the money,
and also appeared frequently on television, winning a best actress Emmy
in 1993 for Life Goes On.
Her films were by and large undistinguished, but she had a strong
personality and with her dark hair -- which turned a striking silver
with age -- and good looks, was always someone to be noticed. In her
first Hollywood film, Night Unto Night made in 1948, her co-star for the
melodrama was Ronald Reagan. It was directed by Don Siegel, who became
her third husband.
She was in Adventures of Don Juan (1948) with Errol Flynn, the 1950
film noir, Dark City, played Mary in King of Kings (1962), the 1961 life
of Christ directed by George Stevens starring Jeffrey Hunter, known in
the trade as I Was a Teenage Jesus, and in Exorcist 111 in 1991, and
last year was in Stargate, the science fiction film starring James
Spader.
An American citizen, she spent most of her life in her adopted country
and, if her film career was less than memorable, her career in the
theatre was far more successful. She made her Broadway debut in 1955 in
Anastasia giving a performance described as electrifying, appeared in
plays by Shakespeare and Tenessee Williams, as well as in her own
feminist one-woman show, I Am a Woman, which she toured round America,
Canada, and Sweden, and studied at the Actors' Theatre.
Her fourth husband, George Tabori, the writer, producer, and director,
worked with her in devising a Brecht anthology called Brecht on Brecht
which she toured round America during the 1960s. In 1971 that marriage,
like its three predecessors, ended in divorce and she did not remarry.
She died while touring Sweden with her own play, In Search of
Strindberg, in which she herself played the controversial author and
artist August Strindberg. She is survived by two sons, one from her
first marriage, one from her third, and a daughter from her second, the
actress, Lena Tabori.
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