Swedish actor known for his roles in Ingmar Bergman's films and television dramas
Although the actors who comprised Ingmar Bergman's repertory company all went on to make their own prestigious careers, they will for ever be associated with the great Swedish film and stage director. Erland Josephson, who has died aged 88 after suffering from Parkinson's disease, was artistically linked with Bergman even more than Max Von Sydow, Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Thulin. Josephson appeared in more than a dozen of Bergman's films, and played a Bergman surrogate in Ullmann's Faithless (2000).
In middle and old age, he was chosen by directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Theo Angelopoulos for the qualities he revealed in the Bergman films – a certain self-centred introspection and a deep melancholy, etched on his lined and grizzled features. Because he became a leading film actor in his 50s, he seems never to have been young.
His work with Bergman dated back to the 1940s, when they were at the Municipal theatre, Helsingborg. They then worked together at Gothenburg Municipal theatre and the Royal Dramatic theatre, Stockholm, where he took over from Bergman as artistic director in 1966.
Josephson was born in Stockholm into a cultured family (his father owned a bookshop). He studied at the university there before taking up acting. "I am of the international upper class, the Swedish petit bourgeoisie of Jewish extraction with poor language skills, a conveyor of a few expressions and faces, with some intonation that combines ancient human experience with timely coquetry," he once said.
He made his screen debut in Bergman's second film as director, It Rains on Our Love (1946). His first substantial role for Bergman was one of the three husbands waiting in a maternity ward in So Close to Life (1958). In The Magician (aka The Face, 1958), he looks surprisingly youthful as a weak-willed, cuckolded consul who humiliates and interrogates a troupe of performers.
It was 10 years before he returned to making films. He played a sinister baron in Hour of the Wolf (1968) and an unhappily married man in The Passion of Anna (1969), playing second male lead (to Von Sydow) in both. This would change in 1973 with Scenes from a Marriage, a six-part TV series edited down to 168 minutes for cinematic release. The film, an acting tour de force played largely in close-up, focuses on the trauma of a beleaguered marriage, as the wife (Ullmann) tries to cope with the infidelity of her husband (Josephson) with a younger woman (Bibi Andersson). He co-starred with Ullmann again in Face to Face (1976), as a sympathetic doctor who rescues her from a nervous breakdown.
Meanwhile, he began appearing, less happily, in films by other directors. He was a febrile Nietzsche in Liliana Cavani's preposterous Beyond Good and Evil (1977); an opera-loving gay man in To Forget Venice (1979); a chauvinist in Montenegro (1981); and a former ambassador hovering in bars in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988).
There were better roles, especially in Tarkovsky's last films, Nostalgia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986), proving that few actors could more convincingly express modern angst than Josephson. In the former, he believes that the end of the world is nigh (although the end of the film never seems near). In the latter, at the start of a nuclear war, he is a writer who makes a pact with God that he will renounce his family and possessions if the world is allowed to return to normal.
In contrast, he demonstrated great warmth in Fanny and Alexander (1982), one of Bergman's most optimistic films, and was lively and lovable in Angelopoulos's Ulysses' Gaze (1995). "In Bergman's world I represented a sort of intellectual, sceptical, ironic person, rather cold and frustrated," he said. "When I went abroad and made films in Italy and other places, I was used in different ways. I was often cast as crazy people … I think perhaps that changed how Ingmar saw me. Suddenly I was on the more magical side of his world, playing the people with fantasies, variety, the artists."
Josephson starred in Bergman's television dramas as the director's alter ego, Vogler. Bergman directed him on stage in A Doll's House (1989), The Bacchae (1996), The Ghost Sonata (2000) and Mary Stuart (2000). In 1988, he gave a vital, engaged performance in English as Gaev in Peter Brook's production of The Cherry Orchard in New York.
It was inevitable and fitting that Josephson should have appeared in Bergman's last work, Saraband (2003), which follows the couple from Scenes from a Marriage long after their divorce. In a prologue, 10 scenes and an epilogue, featuring four speaking characters, Bergman's rapport with Josephson is at its height.
As well as teaching drama and chairing many theatrical institutions (he was active in Swedish Equity), Josephson wrote novels, stories, plays, scripts and poems. He was married to the actors Kristina Adolphson and Barbro Larsson, and is survived by his five children and his wife, the dramaturge Ulla Åberg.
• Erland Josephson, actor and director, born 15 June 1923; died 25 February 2012