Liv Ullmann

Ullmann is Norwegian, and her career is inseparable from one collaboration. She met Ingmar Bergman as an actress and became his most frequent lead, and the two were together for five years; the films from that period are why she is routinely named among the great European screen actresses.

What Bergman found in her was a face that could be held. Persona is built almost entirely on it: she plays an actress who has stopped speaking, and she carries half a film without a line, in close-up, while another character talks. Most performers would fill that silence with signalling. Ullmann lets it sit and makes the audience do the work, so a whole interior life gets projected onto her by people who were only watching. She did versions of that across Hour of the Wolf, Shame, The Passion of Anna, Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage and Autumn Sonata, and never repeated herself.

There was a Hollywood stretch in the early 1970s that did her few favours: a musical, a romantic comedy, a Western, and a role in A Bridge Too Far. Those credits look like an industry with no idea what it had been handed.

She directs as well, including Faithless and a film of Miss Julie, and she holds a Golden Globe for a leading dramatic performance. Late on she appeared in Two Lives and as herself in a documentary about Bergman, which is a fitting shape: she is still the person a camera goes to when it wants to know what he was actually like.