Liv Remembers Ingmar

9Oct09

More than two years after Ingmar Bergman’s death, his muse Liv Ullmann is still bursting with stories about the Swedish director. In a poignant and insightful profile by Diane Solway in this month’s issue of W—on the occasion of Ullmann’s American-theater directorial debut with A Streetcar Named Desire (featuring Cate Blanchett), at the Brooklyn Academy of Music—she reveals some choice nuggets from her experiences with her director and onetime romantic partner, including an awkward dinner introduction of speechless fan Woody Allen to Bergman and Bergman’s stealing thoughts from her journal to incorporate into Scenes from a Marriage. One of the most shocking revelations is that collaborating with the famously gloomy director was . . . fun: “We who worked with him were all playmates,” she says. “On his sets there was so much joking around.”