Gunnel Lindblom in The Seventh Seal, 1957, directed by Ingmar Bergman. Photograph: TCD/Alamy
The Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman was renowned for writing complex and demanding roles for women such as Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann. Further down the cast list, but prized by the director throughout his career, was Gunnel Lindblom, who has died aged 89.
She appeared in several of his best-known pictures, including The Seventh Seal (1957), in which she was the young mute woman who accompanies a knight’s squire (Gunnar Björnstrand) after he saves her from being raped. When she eventually speaks, it is to deliver the film’s final words: “It is finished.” Lindblom had played the role in an earlier stage version. “I am a rather silent person,” she said, “so maybe he gave me those parts just because he knew I don’t like to talk a lot. I prefer to listen.”
Gunnel Lindblom obituary
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gunnel-lindblom-dead - The Washington Post
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Gunnel Lindblom, sensual star of Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Silence,’ dies at 89 Tim Page Gunnel Lindblom, a Swedish actress and director who played small, indelible roles in some of Ingmar Bergman’s most celebrated early films and then a central character in the once-scandalous “The Silence” (1963), died Jan. 24 at her home in Brottby, northeast of Stockholm. She was 89. Her family announced the death and did not provide a cause. In Ms. Lindblom’s first movie for Bergman, she spoke only one line. She played a servant girl, described as mute, in “The Seventh Seal” (1957), Bergman’s international breakthrough. The apocalyptic story, based on the Book of Revelation and set during the years of the Black Plague, tells of a Knight (Max von Sydow) who bargains desperately for more time to be alive with the character of Death by engaging him in a game of chess.