Gerda Lundequist

In Of Love and Lust (1955) - at age 84! - we get to see a brilliant glimpse of a true character actress at her very element: balanced, natural and collected in all her movements and thoughts. In full control of her melodic voice, character and limbs, she delivers as the old Royal Highness a refined example of timeless female bitchiness to a fellow sister! What we get to see is not at all an overacting or old melodramatic gesticulating theatre diva (as you perhaps would expect from a stage actress of her generation and with such a record), but a complete and absolutely magnificent character actress performance.

When she retired from stage with her last performance in 1949 (at age 78) she ended a 60 year long professional stage career (with debut 1889). However, she actually did her very last role the same year she died, in 1959 (at age 88), as the grandmother in the provocative but socially important TV theatre play "Maria Angelica" (a new-written play about a young teenage girls's right to her own sexuality; and a play that also raises the dark subjects of rape and incest) that aired in Swedish Television in 1961, two years after Lundequist's passing.

Also such roles as her lovely cynical Änkedomprostinna, Mrs Hyltenius, in "The Baron's Will" by Hjalmar Bergman (a role she played 1945, 1948 and 1949 in different stagings due to her success in it) and her simple and very moving portrayal of the lonely Mrs Dowey in J. M.

Tutor in the performing arts at the Opera School, the Royal Dramatic Theatre School and the Royal Academy of Music (1931-1946).

Regular guest lecturer in drama and oral presentation (1925-1954) at Kvinnliga Medborgarskolan (i.E "The Women's Citizen School") in Fogelstad, Sweden (a school that was run by the Swedish feminist pioneer group for womens emancipation, the so-called "Fogelstad group", including writer Elin Wägner, Elisabeth Tamm, artist Siri Derkert, a.o). Was also a member of the schools elected council of 22 women.

Managing director of Helsingborgs stadsteater (Helsingborg City Theatre) 1923-1925.

To change from the actress she most likely was as Antigone on stage 1908, or her Lady Macbeth in 1909, via her powerful and yet subtle performance as Margaretha Samzelius, the matron at Ekeby, in classic silent film The Saga of Gösta Berling (1924) - is nothing but a presentation of a true artists development.

Legendary Swedish dramatic stage actress and tragedienne: The brilliant Gerda Lundequist is considered as one of Scandinavian theatre's most important modern female pioneers of the early 1900s stage. With new modern portrayals of the Ibsen, Strindberg and the classic Shakespeare leading women, her importance to modern female stage characterization in Swedish and Scandinavian theatre is not to be underestimated.

Lundequist made her professional debute at Svenska teatern in Stockholm 1889, and her breakthrough came already the following year with her astounding portrayal of Kristina in play "Mäster Olof" by August Strindberg at the old Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. Then followed the magnificent and historically important portrayals of the Shakespeare women Queen Gertrude in "Hamlet" and Lady Macbeth in "Macbeth", title role in "Antigone" by Sofokles, Ingrid in "Peer Gynt" by Henrik Ibsen, Ingeborg in Ibsen's "The Pretenders", title role in Hjalmar Söderberg's "Gertrud", title role in "Monna Vanna" by Maurice Maeterlinck, title role in "Maria Stuart" by Friedrich Schiller, Goneril in Shakespeare's "King Lear", Irene in "When We Dead Awaken" by Ibsen. . . and from there on. Her thespian nickname as "Sweden's Sarah Bernhardt" is indeed flattering, in a way slightly misread and unjust for her as an actress.

Born in Stockholm 1871, she was brought up by foster mother Amalia Charlotta Ekecrantz, a manufacturer's widow, and later tutored by the great Swedish drama teacher Signe Hebbe at the Royal Academy of Music's old Theatre School in Stockholm 1886-89.