Stig Olin

Biography

A distinguished actor, director and composer in Sweden; Stig Olin made his success in many areas of the Swedish entertainment business in the 1940s and 50s. As an actor, he claimed success when he played boyish characters and naive students on film. He was the actor who eventually took the claim of playing Ingmar Bergman's alter-ego in many of his early films, including; Torment (1944) (Bergman's script debut), Crisis (1946), Woman Without a Face (1947) (Bergman wrote the script), Port of Call (1948), Prison (1949), Vers la joie (1950) and Summer Interlude (1951). Stig Olin then went on to directing some films himself in the 1950s: he not only wrote film scripts but also directed these films himself, as well. As a director, his best film is probably his on-screen adaption of children-novelist Astrid Lindgren's Rasmus, Pontus and Toker (1956); a wonderful classic children's film (very beloved in Sweden) to which Olin also composed the music score and also acted the substantial supporting part as the suspicious antique dealer "Ernst", that the kids in the film come across. Stig Olin then suddenly - quite surprisingly, actually - (as he'd never been trained specifically in music) showed his talent as a composer when he came to write many songs (both the music and the lyrics) that today are considered to be classic evergreens/tunes/schlagers in Sweden: "På söndag" (On Sunday), "Karusellvisan" (recorded by himself), "En gång jag seglar i hamn" (recorded by himself), "Jag tror på sommaren" (recorded by son Mats Olin) and "Människors glädje" (recorded, a.o., by his daughter; actress Lena Olin in the 1970s). Stig Olin sang and performed a lot with his wife at that time; Britta Holmberg, both on stage and on the radio (where the Olin-family had their own radio show for many years in the 1950s and 60s). On top of this, he also frequently worked at the Swedish Radio with various other shows/programmes and became a very appreciated director for the Swedish Radio Theatre (Radioteatern). In 1970, he became Director of Programmes at Swedish Radio and, from there on, came to work almost exclusively in the radio business in the 1970s and 1980s. Still, he directed several plays and musicals at various private theatres in Stockholm in the 1950s-1980s (including the original Swedish staging of the Stephen Sondheim musical, "A Little Night Music", based on the Ingmar Bergman comedy, "Smiles of a Summer Night") and he has written numerous theatre sketches for all kinds of revues and made the music arrangements for many musicals throughout his life. His best on-screen performances in films include: Torment (1944), Woman Without a Face (1947), Vers la joie (1950), Summer Interlude (1951), One Fiancé at a Time (1952), Klasskamrater (1952), The Yellow Squadron (1954), Sceningång (1956), Rasmus, Pontus and Toker (1956) and Jim & piraterna Blom (1987).