Do we like them?

Do we like Liv Ullmann?

Our score: 8 out of 10. Decades of real refugee work and no harm on the record, held back by one contested 2018 position on #MeToo.

Liv Ullmann was born in Tokyo in 1938 and grew up in post-war Norway. She became one of the great screen actors of her era, mostly through her work with Ingmar Bergman, including Persona and The Passion of Anna. She went on to Hollywood, Broadway and the director's chair, with stage and film versions of Miss Julie among her credits.

The part that matters most here is what she did next. After visiting a Kampuchean refugee camp in 1980, she took on the International Rescue Committee and UNICEF. She travelled to developing countries and used her fame to push for giving. She told the Christian Science Monitor in 1985 that she refused to spend her life regretting what she failed to do. That's a real commitment, not a photo op.

She also helped found a women's commission for refugee women and children, which gets its own chapter in the 2023 Cannes documentary about her. Her activism has run for decades, and it has cost her something. In January 2026 she told a Swedish outlet she lost her US visa after the refugee group that first proposed her stopped getting funding from the Trump administration.

The recent stoush was about Bergman, not her. Skarsgård said last summer that Bergman was a Nazi during the war. Asked about it in Berlin, Ullmann said she admires Skarsgård as an actor but that Bergman never represented Nazi ideas. She also said she didn't know the director in his youth, and told people to take the claim with a grain of salt. That is loyalty to a late collaborator, not harm. Where you land on Bergman's youth is a separate argument.

She's also honest about her own mistakes. She told Variety she regrets turning down Bergman's Fanny and Alexander to prove her independence, and that he never forgave her. We found no court cases, no accusations and no complaints from co-stars or staff in the sources we checked, though most of the coverage of her is career and humanitarian work.

So, verdict expanded: she passes on being nice with distinction, and the harm test gets an asterisk for the #MeToo remarks. The asterisk is the only thing keeping her below the top of the scale, and it isn't a big one. She's a safe pick for a family that likes people who show up for refugees and women.