Thommy Berggren

After a visit to a local movie theatre at a young age, Berggren fell in love with acting but did not pursue it as a career.[4] During adolescence, he followed his father's tailoring trade and then spent two years at sea. Returning home, he took work in a factory just as his mother had done.[6] However, his desire to act remained with him, and he began to study acting at the Pickwickklubbens theatre school in Gothenburg, which offered lessons to city locals. He made his stage debut at the age of seventeen at the Atelier, a very small theatre situated directly above a bowling alley.[6] He worked there for two years, until 1956, when he was accepted into Gothenburg City Theatre's drama course. Later, he became a premier student, completing the course in 1958.[6]

Soon after, he was engaged as a regular player at the Gothenburg City Theatre, where he worked until 1961, when he was granted a position with the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. In his first role there he portrayed Nick in Ingmar Bergman's production of Edward Albee's play Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf.[6] In 1993, he made his debut as a director at the Royal Dramatic Theatre with Harold Pinter's The Homecoming.[5] He later directed plays at the Stockholm City Theatre, including August Strindberg's Miss Julie and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.[7]

In 1961, Berggren made his film debut in Pärlemor. In 1962 he met aspiring director Bo Widerberg, who became his good friend and one of his most important collaborators. Like Berggren, Widerberg strongly believed that films needed to focus on human relationships, have a greater political significance, and be socially conscious.[8]

As early as 1960, Berggren declared in an interview that he only wanted to do films that he could truly stand for, to play people who developed – an attitude he has maintained through the years.[6] In Widerberg he found a perfect working partner. Their first feature together, Barnvagnen, about a woman who chooses single parenthood instead of marriage, reflected those goals.[6]

The two continued their successful partnership with 1963's Raven's End, a portrait of working class life in 1930's Sweden. Berggren portrayed Anders, a young aspiring writer who finds his hopes and dreams dashed upon the reality of an impoverished existence. In 1966, Berggren was awarded the Guldbagge, the Swedish equivalent of the Oscar, for Widerberg's Heja Roland!, although the film did not receive the same acclaim afforded to its predecessors. But the following year, he and Widerberg embarked on a film that would bring them both international fame, 1967's Elvira Madigan.[9]

The film was based upon the real life romance of Lt. Sixten Sparre and the circus performer Elvira Madigan. In 1889, the pair willfully abandoned their respective lives for each other, but after spending a brief time in Denmark, the couple exhausted their limited finances and the doomed relationship ended in suicide. Widerberg shot the film on a low budget, in natural light and without a script, allowing the actors to improvise freely and to take their time delivering their dialogue. His desire was to make the film appear as if it were a documentary of the couple's romance.[9]

After the success of Elvira Madigan, financially tempting offers began to pour in for Berggren, including the opportunity to sign a lucrative contract with Paramount Pictures in Hollywood. However, he once again defied convention by rejecting those offers because their weak scripts did not measure up to his goals.[5] He openly questioned why so many Swedish actors would dream of making it big in America,[5] and when questioned about his uncompromising nature in 2006, Berggren stated:

I am an artist and I like being one. I belong to a special group of people. I would not compare myself with Van Gogh, Matisse, Munch, Strindberg, or Dostoevsky, but I may be on the same boat, I know. So the talent I have, I have tried to manage. Then you tend to become stubborn and you wish to implement what you believe through your art, otherwise you are not an artist, at least you don't achieve the color and the magic that you would hope for. I see it as a necessary nicety to not have to compromise.[7]

Berggren continued to focus on mainly Swedish productions, including a 1969 television adaptation of August Strindberg's play Miss Julie, about the class struggle between a count's daughter and his man servant, Jean.[6] Berggren portrayed the role of Jean. In 1971, he worked once again with Bo Widerberg in a tribute to labor, Joe Hill, a film based upon the life of the Swedish–American agitator who helped to forward the worker's rights movement in the early 1900s. Passionately proletarian, it elevated the already well known Hill to legendary status with its sympathetic portrayal.[6]

Berggren's career on stage and screen continued to be influenced heavily by the "underdog syndrome", a fact he openly discussed in Jarl's The Bricklayer.[10] His desire to portray outsiders in society remained apparent in his choice of film roles, from 1975's Giliap, in which he portrays a waiter with a longing to escape his life, to 1986's Gosta Berlings Saga where his role was that of an alcoholic clergyman.[6] He also continued to work with Widerberg on several projects, including a 1988 television adaptation of Strindberg's The Father.[6]

In 1999, while preparing for the opening of a play, Berggren suffered a heart ailment in which one of the valves began to malfunction. The illness caused him to drop out of the play and then to retire from the stage.[4] In 2003, he appeared in his last film Kontorstid, about the often empty and meaningless routine of work and daily life. He stated that he felt as if the film and television industry were no longer creating quality work the way that they once did.[5] However, he still dreamed of returning to the stage as an actor, his one true passion.[4] In later years, he devoted himself to periodically directing plays at the Stockholm City Theatre and to his family.[4]

Often considered to be one of Sweden's best and most gifted actors, Bo Widerberg once described the Berggren "magic" and his "stage presence", his sorrowful eyes and intensely emotional style effectively portraying societal outsiders like Lt. Sparre and Joe Hill.[6] However, in spite of his reputation, he did not appear to suffer from a feeling of self-importance or artistic snobbery.[11] His most recent project was a collaboration with Stefan Jarl on the screenplay of his 2013 documentary Goodness![6] The film focuses on the moral decline within economics. Berggren also appeared in the film, both as himself and in character, portraying the role of a greedy miser.[12]