Sjöström, Victor

Sjöström, Victor (1879-1960), Swedish actor, and film and theatre director. From 1896, Sjöström worked as an actor and stage manager for a number of touring theatre companies in Sweden and Finland before setting up his own touring company in 1911.

The following year, Sjöström was contracted to Svenska Biografteatern for whom he acted in 20, and directed some 37 films, including a highly expressive indictment of Sweden's poor law system, Ingeborg Holm (1913); a group of heroic dramas that established an international reputation for Swedish film, beginning with Terje Vigen (A Man There Was, 1917) and Berg-Ejvind och hans hustru (The Outlaw and his Wife, 1918 ); and poignant dramas (often adapted from the work of Selma Lagerlöf) such as Tösen från Stormyrtorpet ( The Girl from the Marshcroft, 1917) and Ingmarssönerna (The Ingmarssons, 1919). This last film displayed the slowly paced action and concern for compositional symmetry that characterized Sjöström’s work. With elaborate use of multiple exposure, and framed and nested narratives, Körkarlen (The Phantom Carriage, 1921) was his most ambitious production before he left Sweden in 1923 to work in Hollywood. Of the films Sjöström directed in the United States, He Who Gets Slapped (1924), The Scarlet Letter (1926), and The Wind (1928) have continued to receive critical acclaim.

Returning to Sweden in 1930, Sjöström resumed his career as an actor in film and theatre, becoming an artistic director for Svensk Filmindustri between 1943 and 1949. Among the generation on whom Sjöström had a formative influence was Ingmar Bergman, for whom Sjöström acted in Till Glädje (To Joy, 1950) and Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries, 1957).