Viveca Lindfors

Life and career

Lindfors was born in Uppsala, Sweden, the daughter of Karin Emilia Therese (née Dymling) and Axel Torsten Lindfors.

She trained at the Royal Dramatic Theatre School, Stockholm. Soon after, she became a theater and film star in Sweden. She moved to the United States in 1946 after being signed by Warner Bros. and began working in Hollywood. She appeared in more than one hundred films, including Night Unto Night, No Sad Songs for Me, Dark City, The Halliday Brand, King of Kings, An Affair of the Skin, Creepshow, The Sure Thing, and Stargate. She appeared with actors such as Ronald Reagan, Jeffrey Hunter, Charlton Heston, Lizabeth Scott and Errol Flynn.

Lindfors appeared frequently on television, usually as a guest star, though she played the title role in the miniseries Frankenstein's Aunt. Most of her TV appearances were in the 1950s and 1960s, with a resurgence in the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1990 she won an Emmy Award for her guest appearance on the ABC series Life Goes On. She was nominated for an Emmy in 1978 for her supporting role in the TV movie A Question of Guilt.

In 1962 she shared the Silver Bear for Best Actress award with Rita Gam at the Berlin Film Festival, for their performances in Tad Danielewski's No Exit. Among her later film roles, perhaps the most memorable is the kindly and worldly-wise Professor Taub in The Sure Thing (1985).

Lindfors was married four times: to Harry Hasso, a Swedish cinematographer; Folke Rogard, a Swedish attorney and World Chess Federation president; Don Siegel, the director; and George Tabori, a Hungarian writer, producer and director. She had three children: two sons (John Tabori with Hasso, and the actor Kristoffer Tabori, with Siegel) and a daughter (Lena Tabori, with Rogard).

In the last years of her life, she taught acting at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and had a lead role (essentially playing herself) in Henry Jaglom's Last Summer in the Hamptons (1995). The same year she returned to the Strindberg Festival in Stockholm to perform in the play In Search of Strindberg, which had been produced earlier that year at the Actors Studio. Lindfors was a naturalized U.S. citizen and a liberal Democrat who supported the presidency of Jimmy Carter and later said of her former co-star Ronald Reagan that, “Ronnie was not a big star. He didn’t carry enough weight. To think that the guy became President is really kind of funny.”

Death

She died from complications of rheumatoid arthritis at the age of 74 in her native Uppsala, and was buried in Sweden. In New York City, a service was held at the Actors Studio where Gene Frankel, who had directed her in I Am a Woman and Brecht on Brecht, addressed the mourners.

Major stage appearances