RIP Gunnel Lindblom: The Seventh Seal Actress and Ingmar Bergman Favorite Dies at 89

No matter how savvy a chess player you are, Death will catch up with you eventually. The Seventh Seal actress and Ingmar Bergman staple Gunnel Lindblom has died at age 89, as reported by SVT.

Lindblom—who died on January 24 after a short illness—was a staple of stage and screen with 60 acting credits on the latter alone, spanning her early days in the ‘50s and ‘60s Bergman films The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring, Wild Strawberries and The Silence to 2009’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. She made her film debut in 1952’s Kärlek, which put her on Bergman’s radar. He quickly asked her to work with him in the theater. A few years later, and she burst onto the scene in his films.

Standing out even in her early Bergman performances (she had a single line as a seemingly mute girl accompanying Max von Sydow’s knight in The Seventh Seal, who is moved to speak the words of Jesus: “It is finished”), the native of Gothenburg, Sweden also worked at the Royal Dramatic Theatre since 1968.

There she continued her professional relationship with Bergman, acting in his productions (Hamlet, Faust) and directing alongside him—eventually moving on to helm dozens of plays. Her directorial debut on the feature side of things, 1977’s Paradise Square, screened at Cannes and was met with relative box office success. That film and her follow-up, Sally and Freedom, were both produced by Bergman.

Lindblom had been honored with the Stockholm Achievement Award from the Stockholm Film Festival and an honorary Guldbagge Award, the country’s Oscar equivalent, from the Swedish Film Institute.