Mai Zetterling

About Mai Zetterling

Who is it?: Actress, Director, Writer
Birth Day: May 24, 1925
Birth Place:  Västerås, Västmanlands län, Sweden, Sweden
Died On: 17 March 1994(1994-03-17) (aged 68)\nLondon, England, UK
Birth Sign: Gemini
Occupation: Actress, film director
Years active: 1941-1993
Spouse(s): Tutte Lemkow (1944 - 1953) (divorced) David Hughes (1958 - 1979) (divorced)
Children: Dr. Louis Lemkow-Zetterling Etienne Lemkow-Zetterling

Mai Zetterling Net Worth

Mai Zetterling was born on May 24, 1925 in  Västerås, Västmanlands län, Sweden, Sweden, is Actress, Director, Writer. Mai Zetterling was born in Sweden in 1925, and lived briefly in Australia while still a child. She's known as a director and actor and trained on the Stockholm repertory stage, she began appearing in war-era films starting in her teens. Following her debut in Lasse-Maja (1941), she made quite an impact in the terminally dark Ingmar Bergman-written film Hets (1944) [known as Torment in the US and Frenzy in the UK], who went on to direct her in his Musik i mörker (1948) [Music in Darkness].The international attention she received from her Bergman association led her to England where she debuted in the title role of Frieda (1947), a war drama co-starring David Farrar, Glynis Johns and Flora Robson. Developing modest sex symbol success, she went on to co-star opposite a number of handsome leading men throughout the post-war years in primarily dramatic works, including Dennis Price in The Bad Lord Byron (1949), Dirk Bogarde in Blackmailed (1951), Herbert Lom in The Ringer (1952), Richard Widmark in A Prize of Gold (1955), Tyrone Power in Seven Waves Away (1957) (which was a variation on Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944)), John Gregson in Faces in the Dark (1960), William Sylvester in Offbeat (1961), and Stanley Baker in The Man Who Finally Died (1963). Along the way she proved just as adaptable and sexy in smart comedy when she came between husband and wife Peter Sellers and Virginia Maskell in Only Two Can Play (1962).Mai abandoned acting in the mid-1960s and courted some controversy when she successfully began sitting in the director's chair. Divorced from Norwegian actor Tutte Lemkow in the early 1950s, she later wed writer David Hughes in 1958, who collaborated with her on a number of her directing ventures, which seemed ahead of their time. Obviously influenced by Bergman, the dark, sexy drama Älskande par (1964) [Loving Couples] dealt with homosexual themes and featured nudity; Nattlek (1966) [Night Games] revolved around sexual decadency and repression; and Flickorna (1968) [The Girls], which had an all-star Swedish cast including Bibi Andersson and Harriet Andersson, expounded on women's liberation. She divorced her second husband in 1979. She had two children, Louis and Etienne, from her first marriage.Toward the end of her life, Mai made a return to film acting and is best remembered at this late stage for her nurturing and resilient grandmother in the film The Witches (1990) wherein she is forced to tangle with a particularly virulent ringleader Anjelica Huston to save her grandson from her coven of hags. Mai died of cancer in 1994.
Mai Zetterling is a member of Actress

💰 Net worth: Under Review

Some Mai Zetterling images

Biography/Timeline

1940

Zetterling appeared in film and television productions spanning six decades from the 1940s to the 1990s. Her breakthrough came in the 1944 film Torment written by Ingmar Bergman, in which she played a controversial role as a tormented shopgirl. Shortly afterwards she moved to England and gained instant success there with her title role in Basil Dearden's Frieda (1947) playing opposite David Farrar. After a brief return to Sweden in which she worked with Bergman again in his film Music in Darkness (1948), she returned to England and starred in a number of English films, playing against such leading men as Tyrone Power, Dirk Bogarde, Richard Widmark, Laurence Harvey, Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom, Richard Attenborough, Keenan Wynn, Stanley Baker, and Dennis Price.

1948

Some of her notable films as an Actress include Quartet (1948), a film based on some of W. Somerset Maugham's short stories, The Romantic Age (1949) directed by Edmond T. Gréville, Only Two Can Play (1962) co-starring Peter Sellers and directed by Sidney Gilliat, and The Witches (1990), an adaptation of Roald Dahl's book directed by Nicolas Roeg. Having gained a reputation as a sex symbol in dramas and thrillers, she was equally effective in comedies, and also was very active in British television in the 50s and 60s.

1960

She began directing in the early 1960s, starting with political documentaries and a short film called The War Game (1962), which was nominated for a BAFTA award, and won a Silver Lion at Venice. Her first feature film Älskande par (1964, "Loving Couples"), based on the novels of Agnes von Krusenstjerna, was banned at the Cannes Film Festival for its sexual explicitness and nudity. Kenneth Tynan of The Observer later called it "one of the most ambitious debuts since Citizen Kane." It was not the only film she made that would stir up controversy for its frank sexuality (early pioneer on voyeurism).

1994

In her autobiography, All Those Tomorrows, published in 1985, Zetterling details love affairs with actor Herbert Lom and later Tyrone Power, with whom she lived from 1956 until early 1958. She was married to Norwegian actor Tutte Lemkow from 1944 to 1953. Lemkow and Zetterling had a daughter, Etienne and a son, Louis, who is professor of environmental sociology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. From 1958 to 1976 she was married to British author David Hughes, who collaborated with her on her first films as Director. She died in London, from cancer on 17 March 1994, at the age of 68, a year after her final role on television. Recently released documents at the National Archives in London show that she, a member of the Hollywood Left, was watched by British security agents as a suspected Communist. However, the UK never had a system along the lines of the American Hollywood Blacklist. She died in her home.