Stina Eklund steps off the stage after 50 years

Popular actor Stina Ekblad retires from acting after a career spanning 50 years. She started at the Theater in Odense as a 21-year-old and was then called by Ingmar Bergman because he wanted her to appear in Fanny and Alexander.

– It’s fun to be reminded of a long, fun and rich professional life, says Stina Ekblad in Efter fem.

She has also appeared in a number of feature films, including Wallander and in 2001 she played in the Beck film The Man Without a Face.

– I remember that particular scene in The Faceless Man, the decisive scene where you find out who the killer is. We recorded it on the very first day of recording. That was a bit difficult, to first tell what terrible things you had done, and then play all the other scenes, says Stina Ekblad.

When asked what she feels most happy to have been a part of during her career, she answers classic texts.

– It has been my great joy in theater life. The classical, Greek, Shakespeare, Strindberg, Ibsen. All that grandeur that is described by those great writers. They tell us about what it is to be human and what it is like to live.

“Will keep going until I drop”

She is not completely retired yet as she is current at Folkoperan with “Hotell vita hästen” and a musical project that premieres at Dramaten on May 10.

– I will continue to do things like this, which are a little on the side of the theater work itself, until I drop. What I’m doing right now are two fun things, partly this operetta and partly this performance that I’m doing together with Iiris Viljanen.

Ekblad and the musician Iiris Viljanen grew up in the villages of Solv and Tölby in Finnish Ostrobothnia. They write the performance will depict an “Osterbottenless” darkness.

– We play a little with “bottomless” and Ostrobothnia. We thought it was a funny word, bottomless ourselves and coming from Ostrobothnia, which has a bottom. But we also captured this slightly black, poetic, sentimental and tumultuous thing that is found in the Ostrobothnian language well in the word Ostrobottenlöst, because it also feels a little laconic humorous.

She says that Iiris and her home villages are two kilometers apart.

– We discovered that once we started talking to each other at Dramaten. Iiris worked at the reception from the beginning and I heard from her that she came from the same area as me.

Retirement not as daunting

As a 70-year-old, Stina Ekblad does not think that retirement feels as daunting anymore.

– It costs me more in practical terms and more to memorize and learn texts. Keeping the text and the design alive for a longer period is demanding, says Stina.

She also believes that the theater she is trained for is not as modern as lower.

– The performing theater where you meet another person in a text and convey it to an audience, it is not in fashion anymore. Perhaps what is in fashion now is some kind of performing arts. That is, theater as event, as activism, sociological investigation or installation, says Stina Ekblad.