Erland Josephson, Bergman Star, Dead at 88
We were just talking about Scenes From a Marriage, too: The Swedish actor-writer-director Erland Josephson has died following a protracted battle with Parkinson's Disease. He was 88. Josephson came to prominence as a friend, theater colleague and eventual ensemble player for the great Ingmar Bergman, finally breaking into the leading-man ranks in the filmmaker's seminal relationship epic Scenes before eventually diversifying with roles in films by Peter Greenaway (Prospero's Books), Philip Kaufman (The Unbearable Light of Being) and, most indelibly, Andrei Tarkovsky, who cast Josephson in his 1986 masterpiece The Sacrifice. Very sad. R.I.P. [NYT]
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Please see Saraband. Yes, it sees the lovers from Scenes giving one another a glance after lifetimes apart. But it isn't about that.
It was no "minor work," as the critical consensus sound-byte suggests.
The final note of the final coda with Marianne took Bergman a lifetime to create. And Erland Josephson's performance as the unrelenting Johan is one of the bravest I have scene in cinema.
We may have forgotten as a culture that human beings who've held onto deliberate lives into their 80's may actually have access to a wisdom we cannot fully qualify, arch snarkers that we are.
A truly great actor. To borrow a phrase-- we shall not look upon his like again.