Woman Without a Face

Swedish filmmaker born in Helsinki in 1888 and died in Stockholm in 1973. Between 1907 and 1909 he trained at the Dramaten in Stockholm, where he later taught students such as Greta Garbo, and worked as an actor at the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki and at the Dramaten itself. He wrote several scripts for Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller, before making his debut in 1920 with ‘Bodakungen’, which marked the beginning of his collaboration with Svensk Filmindustri and helped to launch Scandinavian cinema. In his half-a-century-long career in cinema, he directed farces and comedies, dramas and period pieces, films for children and young people, biopics and films depicting the war and its aftermath. He participated in the Venice Film Festival with films such as ‘A Woman’s Face’ (1938), ‘Jacobs Stege’ (1942), ‘Eva’ (1949) and ‘The Woman Without a Face’, which was the first of his two collaborations with a young Ingmar Bergman as a screenwriter (the other was ‘Divorced’, 1951).