Sven Wollter
Swedish television made Sven Wollter famous before Swedish cinema did. His breakthrough came as Gusten in an adaptation of Strindberg's The People of Hemsö, and from there he became one of those actors a national culture simply has on hand: the authority figure, the difficult husband, the tired policeman, in whatever the country was making that decade. He was a writer and a political activist as well, and never especially quiet about either. Sweden's Guldbagge awards record him as a best actor winner, and he was named the country's best actor twice.
Two roles carried abroad. The first is Detective Sergeant Lennart Kollberg in Bo Widerberg's Man on the Roof, taken from the Martin Beck novels and still one of the best police films Sweden has produced. He returned to Widerberg's world of exhausted Stockholm detectives in The Man from Majorca, as Bo Jarnebring.
The second is Victor in Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice, the doctor in a household waiting out the end of the world, which placed a Swedish television actor inside the final film of one of cinema's most demanding directors.
English language work was rarer and blunter, chiefly King Hrothgar in The 13th Warrior. At home he stayed in the middle of things, in popular comedies like House of Angels, in talk shows such as Renées brygga, and later as a voice in the animated anthology The House.
Movies (6)
TV (2)
Where to start with Sven Wollter
See The Sacrifice first, provided you have the patience Tarkovsky demands. Wollter's Victor is the sane man in a house losing its grip, and the film is one of the great final works in cinema.
If that sounds forbidding, begin instead with Man on the Roof, a hard, unglamorous police film with a genuinely alarming set piece above the rooftops of Stockholm, then follow it with The Man from Majorca, the same director working the same seam.
House of Angels is the light option, a village comedy that was hugely popular at home and shows a warmer side of him entirely. The 13th Warrior is the Hollywood curio, and he makes a convincing Hrothgar in a film that never settles on what it wants to be.