Babes and booze - Swedish Film Institute

ROBERT HENRIKSSON/SCANPIx
the perfect gentleman
In the seventies he played opposite Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland, Robert Duvall and Joan
Collins. In his home country Sweden he is known on a first name basis. And at 76 he is as active
as ever, with roles in both the international hit The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Richard Hobert’s
upcoming A One-way to Antibes. Meet Sven-Bertil Taube. Gentleman, singer, actor. TExT ANDRES LOKKO
If Sven-Bertil Taube were French or American
he’d be an out and out national treasure
by now.
He’d be a Johnny Halliday or, say, a Dean
Martin. At least.
But somehow he has slipped through the
net. He is just Sven-Bertil to the Swedish people.
Everyone knows him by his first name
and he seems to mean very different things
to each one of us.
To some, he’s a great actor of both screen
and stage. To some, he’s an ever popular folk
singer and a torch bearer for his father, legendary
Swedish composer and troubadour
Evert Taube, and his evergreen songs. To others,
he’s an all-round gifted entertainer and at
76, with his still amazing looks and great silver
fox hair he has something of the aura of the
quintessential international dandy about him.
Sven-berTil openS The gate to his back garden
in London’s Fulham – he’s been a Londoner
since the early 1970s – in a brand new
preppy stripy summer shirt and casually
worn-in suede car shoes. The perfect gentleman
with all the gravitas to go with it.
So it’s quite fitting that he should go to Antibes
on the French Riviera in director Richard
Hobert’s new psychological drama, the
appropriately titled A One-way to Antibes.
“I’ve worked with Richard Hobert in a
string of films when he did his series based
on the seven deadly sins, but this is the first
proper lead part he’s asked me to do.”
Sven-Bertil plays a widower and retired
French teacher in the northern Swedish univeristy
town of Luleå, who finds out that his
son and daughter are trying to sell his house
behind his back. He decides it is time to
leave.
He buys a single ticket, no return, to Antibes
on the French Riviera, where the secret
love of his life resides.
“They have been, unbeknown to anyone
else, in touch all through my character’s mar-
“It’s also a picture
that manages to
show sides of
Sweden that we
very seldom see in
the movies”
a One-way to antibes
JENS FISHER
a one-waY to
antibes
sVen-beRtil taube
ACTOR
PRODUCTION INFO P. 58
riage. He’s been living a lie; his marriage a
sham, something he has just stayed in for the
sake of their kids. “
It reads a bit like a modern take on Ingmar
Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. Although this
journey continues way further down south
through Europe.
“It really is a story about love and relationships,
both between men and women, whatever
their age, and between fathers and their
children. But it’s also a picture that manages
to show sides of Sweden that we very seldom
see in the movies,” he says.
once upon a time long ago, Sven-Bertil
seemed doomed to be forever seen as the son
of his father Evert Taube, whose songs and
voice are so revered and loved by the Swedes
that his face was recently immortalized on
the new 50 kronor note.
His father long gone, it is easier to view
Sven-Bertil’s career in quite a different light.
In the early-to-mid-1970s he began a lucrative
and successful – but rather shortlived
– career as an actor at Columbia Pictures.
“Regrettably, this all happened right before
the moment when all the major Hollywood
studios went bust and, literally, they all
upped sticks and left Europe for California,
seemingly overnight.”
Sven-Bertil rather humbly reminisces
about the international parts offered to him
in the 1970s (“Oh, I don’t know. It was such a
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