Johanna Sällström (1975-2007)

Johanna Sällström As Linda Wallander And Krister Henriksson
As Kurt Wallander On The Set Of Before the Frost (2004)

Three new episodes of the BBC-1 Wallander mystery series were released on British television this past January, starring Kenneth Branagh as Swedish police Inspector Kurt Wallander. I'm not certain when they'll be released in the U.S.; however, I've seen them already (courtesy of the redoubtable Donka Ufman), and they're excellent.

I've been rereading Henning Mankell's The Fifth Woman over the past week, and wondered this morning whether the latest (and probably the last) Wallander novel had been released in English.

During a search to answer that question, I was stopped in my tracks by a reference about Johanna Sällström, the actress who played Wallander's daughter, Linda, in the Yellow Bird Productions version of the mysteries for Swedish television; she had died in 2007.


Before The Frost; Sällström's Linda Wallander

I didn't know about Henning Mankell's work, the Wallander character or the Swedish version of the televised novels and stories until Branagh's BBC production came to PBS last year. The Yellow Bird Wallander episodes were great; Sällström's portrayal of Wallander's daughter was excellent but dark, complex -- much different than the take on the character portrayed by British actress Jeany Spark.


Spark's Linda Wallander: Not Yet A Cop; British, And So Different

In Mankell's novels, Wallander himself is painfully divorced and awkwardly alone, his relationship with his father adversarial, difficult. He's only focused and certain when working as a police detective -- and he's a good one. Linda Wallander is a counterpoint to her father; trying to keep connections to divorced parents (her mother, remarried, means there's also a stepfather) and grandparents (Wallander's angry, willful artist father), and find her own way in life. Yet, they're both drifting a bit.

Linda darts from small job to University and back, never quite finding something that will anchor her in the world -- until one day, using her father's ability to look for patterns and make decisions, she enters Sweden's national police academy. Eventually, Linda ends up serving as a beat cop in her old home town; now, her relationship with her father is professional as well as familial. She wants to become a Detective -- and Wallander stands aloof, letting other officers in his detective squad make sure she earns it.


Krister Henriksson As Kurt Wallander

As a father, he's seen Linda zip from job to job; he worries -- was she trying to find herself? Is this job just one more sidetrack? As a career investigator he can't carry someone who doesn't have the gift for the work, and it's deadly serious ("You carry a gun. This is life and death"). But, Linda has it, painfully making her debut in a case involving multiple homicides and a childhood friend -- the basic plot of Mankell's novel-turned-Wallander episode, Before The Frost.

Sällström had the opportunity to bring that character to life on Swedish television, and in subsequent episodes of that series. Half of them were original television screenplays authored by other writers; Mankell had given the production company the rights to do so. In fact, he was so impressed with Sällström's acting (as a playwright, and director of one of Sweden's oldest theater companies) that he had projected three more mysteries, featuring Linda Wallander as the investigating detective.


Sällström In 1995: The Up-And-Coming Swedish Teen Star
(Photo: Wikipedia)

Sällström, in many ways, seemed lucky. She was the daughter of a 70's-80's Swedish pop musician, a teenage star of soap operas on Swedish television, and had broken into film acting, even winning an award. Sällström found the attention, her sudden celebrity status, was too much. In 1997, she abruptly put her acting career on hold and moved to Denmark where she worked anonymously in a cafe.


Awards, But Not Happiness: About To Be A Recluse, 1997

She eventually married, returned to Sweden in 2000, and tried to resume her career -- except, instead of the previous bright opportunities from three years before, Sällström found work only in occasional bit parts. Her marriage deteriorated into separation; money was an issue. Relative to her prior fame, a struggle just to have enough to eat and pay rent must have been a real challenge.

Sällström divorced her husband in 2003, shortly after her daughter, Talulah (named after the flamboyant American actress, Talulah Bankhead) was born. Depressed, running out of money, she faced eviction -- and said in a later interview that she felt so isolated and lonely that she even invited the court official, assessing her for eviction, to sit down and have coffee simply for the human contact it offered. It was at that low an ebb that she managed to audition for and won the role of Linda Wallander in Yellow Bird's Production of Mankell's Before The Frost.



This should have been her turning point. She was employed on a hit television series in Sweden as a dramatic actress, her career seemed back on track... then, on December 26, 2004, Sällström was vacationing on the western coast of Thailand -- a popular destination for Swedes -- with her one-year-old daughter when the Sumatran earthquake and Tsunamis struck.


Phuket, Thailand: December 26, 2004

They survived (Sällström held on to a small tree with one hand and her daughter with the other for several hours, until the tidal surge stopped, and receded), but watched hundreds of people killed around her, including friends and dozens of fellow Swedes. After her return to Sweden, the experience never left her.

She returned to her acting career, but suffered nightmares and depression. By 2006, Sällström was briefly hospitalized in a psychiatric unit in Malmö, where she lived. In February of 2007, at age 32, she took an overdose of sleeping pills; at the time, her daughter was five.


Henning Mankell

Henning Mankell had been involved with the Yellow Bird productions of his novels, and was impressed with Sällström's ability as an actress and personal courage, enough to consider writing three more Wallander books focused on Linda Wallander as the central figure.

Mankell spends his time when not writing or directing very actively involved in raising awareness about HIV-AIDS, and to provide support (primarily in Africa) for those afflicted with it. In the past several years, he spent his own money to build three schools in Mozambique. He's helped to found the country's first national theater troupe.

It's only a guess, but it doesn't seem out of character for Mankell that he might have considered further Wallander mysteries centered on the character Sällström brought to life as a way he could help her by doing what he loves to do best -- write. The Wallander books were Mankell's way of exploring contemporary Swedish social themes, but he'd said that the character was becoming stale for him as an artist. Seeing Sällström's acting work may have given him additional inspiration to continue using the characters he'd made in a slightly different way.

Her death shocked and affected him, enough that he abandoned the plan -- his most recent Wallander novel, The Troubled Man, released in Sweden last year and to be published in English sometime in 2010, will probably be Mankell's last featuring his most internationally-famous creation.

It's an odd feeling, in retrospect, thinking about the Swedish Wallander productions with this new, additional perspective of talent, tragedy; a shortened life. Sällström initially appeared as Wallander's daughter does in Mankell's novels: An on-again, off-again supporting player; then, she became one of the two central characters. She was good, she had solid credits to build a career upon -- but her internal support was thin.



Depression is a weight of almost unimaginable proportions. Like an iceberg, most of it is hidden from the outside world; others don't see it or understand it. But, that weight inexorably pulls its sufferers down a spiral staircase within themselves, to a place progressively darker and where what little air is left seems fouled. And whether or not someone can find their way back becomes a crapshoot, like so many things in life. Not everyone who gets pulled down has the luck or strength to return into the light.

I enjoyed Sällström's work, and only wish she'd lived longer, so that we could have seen more of it.

---