Mai Zetterling in the UK: from stardom to freedom

Mai Zetterling’s directorial work is incredibly varied, including visceral documentaries, visually stunning features and surreal children’s films. From writing to editing, she engaged with the entire process of filmmaking in her desire to gain control over her career and tell stories on screen that mattered to her.

Her first dramatic short, The War Game (1962), was made in the UK, but most of her films were made in her native Sweden, where she quickly established herself as an auteur. Yet, the formative period of her life and career was spent in Britain where she was a film star for 15 years. It was a period of growing frustration that saw her trapped in dull roles in films she regarded as mediocre, and she eventually fell out of love with acting all together, with even the theatre failing to offer her any satisfaction.

Although her experiences within the British film industry eventually led to a realisation of what she didn’t want to do, her time in the UK was undoubtedly a period of discovery, of liberation and of learning.

She arrived in London in 1946, to find a city suffering the devastation of war and still enduring rationing. Director Basil Dearden had brought her over from Sweden to play the title role in Ealing Studios’ Frieda (1947), about the hostility faced by a German refugee brought to a small English town by the soldier she saved. The studio housed her, with husband Tutte Lemkow and their young daughter, in a dark, dingy basement flat in Victoria where all she could see of her new surroundings were “puddles and people’s ankles and cats slinking through iron bars”.

But she was thrilled at the chance to discover a new place and refused the car offered by the studio, preferring to travel by underground, where she could observe British people up close. She warmed to their friendliness and found endearing the eccentricity that seemed to her an innately British trait.

Coming from Sweden, where actors were judged on talent, notions of stardom were alien to her, and she found the behaviour of her leading man in Frieda, David Farrar, unprofessional. Always late to the set each morning, she recalled that he would be found sipping champagne in his dressing room while cast and crew waited for him.

Dearden found her somewhat aloof at first, though he was deeply impressed by her performance as the waif-like Frieda. The pressbook for the film promoted her as a promising Swedish star, perhaps hoping to launch a new Garbo or Bergman, but the publicists at Ealing soon realised she was no glamour puss, being uninterested in expensive clothes and rarely wearing make-up or having her hair done. In promotional shots, she appears awkward, the distracted look in her eyes suggesting discomfort at having to adopt a pose for the camera.

Petite, with expressive blue eyes, she had neither the exotic sensuality of Greta, nor the warmth and naturalness of Ingrid, but proved herself a sensitive and versatile actress. After Frieda came several other similar roles in films exploring the chaos of post-war Europe, such as Portrait from Life (1948), The Lost People (1949) and Desperate Moment (1953).

Her Scandinavian credentials soon led to her being dubbed a ‘passion girl’, and Edmond T. Gréville cast her as a teenage coquette who seduces a male teacher in The Romantic Age (1949). In The Bad Lord Byron (1949) she was judged to have brought “freshness and charm” to the role of the poet’s lover Teresa Giuccioli.

In one of her rarest films, Blackmailed (1951), she plays a wife bullied by her hypochondriac husband. Though critics found little to praise overall, one wrote of Zetterling: “There is magic in this woman, for however trite may be the film she appears in she makes you believe her.” The only film from this period that she recalled with any pride was Desperate Moment, about which the review in the People asserted: “Mai Zetterling gives one of her best and most haunting performances as the sweetheart of a man sentenced to death.”

Her affection for this title was perhaps due the presence of her co-star, Dirk Bogarde, another actor disenamoured with the British film industry. The two had developed a mutually stimulating working relationship in 1951 during a nine-month West End run of Jean Anouilh’s play Point of Departure and were pleased to be reunited.

While they exuded passion on stage and screen, Bogarde and Zetterling maintained a distance when not performing, but she formed intimate relationships with other co-stars. Married at 18, she had never had the chance to explore her own sexuality, but that changed after her divorce from Tutte Lemkow in 1953. Affairs with Peter Finch, Herbert Lom and Tyrone Power were formative experiences, before her second marriage to British writer David Hughes, who was to become her key creative collaborator when she embarked on her filmmaking career.

Perhaps appearing in Muriel Box’s most personal feature, The Truth About Women (1957), gave Zetterling the confidence to believe that she too could move behind the camera. Her memoirs don’t recount her experiences of working with a female director; while both women were dismissive of marriage, they were separated by a generation and their contrasting approaches to filmmaking.

Like Box, Zetterling’s first foray into production was via documentary, persuading the BBC to fund a trip to the Arctic Circle in December 1960 to film The Polite Invasion, about the nomadic way of life of the Lapps. This was followed by a record of an annual Traveller gathering in France, filmed the following year and entitled Lords of Little Egypt.

Sadly, neither film has been available since, so her first creative efforts can’t be assessed. But through them, Zetterling gained the confidence to share her ideas on relationships and politics through a uniquely female cinematic lens.

Passion and All That Goes With It: The Films of Mai Zetterling runs at BFI Southbank in May.