A Guy Named Johan

I was saddened this morning to learn of the death at 88 on February 25 of Swedish actor Erland Josephson, who collaborated with Ingmar Bergman on the stage and in more than a dozen films over a period of almost sixty years, from It Rains on Our Love (1946) to Saraband (2003), but is probably best remembered as Johan, Liv Ullmann’s husband in Scenes from a Marriage (1973). He also co-wrote Bergman’s All These Women (1964), appeared in The Passion of Anna (1969), The Touch (1971), Cries and Whispers (1972), and Face to Face (1976), and worked with other filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky (Nostalgia, 1983; The Sacrifice, 1986), Philip Kaufman (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1988), and Peter Greenaway (Prospero’s Books, 1991). Also dead at 88 the day before was Jan Berenstain, who with her late husband, Stan, wrote and illustrated hundreds of books featuring the eponymous Berenstain Bears; I can’t tell you how many of those delightful escapades I read to my daughter over and over, so it feels like a piece of her childhood has died as we bid farewell to two talented, if utterly dissimilar, artists.