Marie Richardson
Marie Richardson is an actor, born 1959.
Richardson trained at the Teaterhögskolan in Stockholm from 1982 to 1985 and joined the Royal Dramatic Theatre immediately afterwards, where she has been an ensemble member ever since. That is the unusual shape of the career: a permanent stage job in Stockholm, with film and television fitted around it for three decades rather than the other way round.
The skill she keeps being hired for is composure under pressure. She plays women who have already decided how much they are going to show you, and the interest is in watching that decision cost them something. It is why her scene as Marion in Eyes Wide Shut registers at all in a film that is otherwise not looking at her: the part asks for a woman holding herself together in front of a stranger, and she does exactly that, with no visible effort.
Her Swedish work has a spine most international audiences miss. She played Helén Andersson in Zero Tolerance in 1999 and was still playing her a decade later in the Johan Falk feature and the television series that grew out of it, which is a rare thing for a supporting character to survive. She was Märta Werkelin in The Best Intentions, Anna Berg in Faithless, Anne in Madame de Sade, and the police officer at the centre of Before We Die. More recently she has done comedy in Tuesday Club, and she appears as herself in Bergman: A Year in a Life and in Filmworker.
Movies (10)
TV (2)
Where to start with Marie Richardson
Start with Before We Die, the one thing here built around her rather than beside her; it is a slow, unglamorous Swedish thriller and her Hanna is the reason it holds together. Then go to Eyes Wide Shut and watch a single scene do a great deal with very little. Faithless and The Best Intentions are the serious Swedish dramas, both painful in a considered way, and both worth more of your evening than anything else on this page. Zero Tolerance is the origin of a character she carried into Johan Falk years later, so take them in order or the continuity is wasted. Tuesday Club is the light one, and it is perfectly good, but do not make it your introduction to her.