Linn Ullmann
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Linn Ullmann (born 9 August 1966, Oslo, Norway) is the daughter of actress Liv Ullmann and director Ingmar Bergman, and a respected Norwegian author and journalist.
At an early age she occasionally appeared in her mother's films, and had a notable bit part in her father's film of Mozart's The Magic Flute. During the overture, the camera cuts among numerous faces in the opera audience (including, briefly, Bergman's own and that of his long-time cinematographer Sven Nykvist). But the face that recurs regularly during this scene is that of a child, who clearly is quietly entranced by the opera. This is Linn.
Linn dreamed of becoming an opera singer but dropped the idea since she could not sing. She then decided to follow in the footsteps of her famous mother, but after a few years at a theatre school in New York, the teacher told her she was a terrible actress. "My mother agreed with the teacher", Ullmann has recounted, "so I became a journalist". She studied literature for six years in New York, finally graduating from New York University in 1988 and then she began work on her Ph.D the same year.
In 1992 she permanently moved back to her native Norway and began to work for the tabloid Dagbladet, one of Norway's largest newspapers.
Eventually she became one of the most prominent newspaper journalists in Norway, and subsequently a highly successful and award winning author. As of 2005 she has written three novels, some of them translated into more than 30 languages, which have received critical acclaim also far outside Norway. Her debut novel, "Before You Sleep" was sold to 14 countries (including the United States, Britain, France and Germany) before it was even published in Norway, a flying start rarely bestowed upon Norwegian authors.
