‘CHANGING’ LEADS TO ‘CHOICES’

Liv Ullmann, the Tokyo-born Norwegian actress who has starred in several of Ingmar Bergman’s finest films, among them “Persona,” “Face to Face,” “Cries and Whispers” and “Scenes From a Marriage,” continues to act “because it is what I do for a living,” as she says.

But at mid-life--she is 45--she has chosen to move into new areas, as an author and as a compassionate public figure deeply and personally involved in the plight of the world’s homeless and starving.

Her first book, “Changing” (Knopf, 1977), was a Book of the Month Club selection and a best seller, an often painfully candid chronicle of her emerging perceptions as woman and mother--and only incidentally as an actress--in the latter years of the 20th Century.

Her second book, “Choices,” just published (Knopf: $14.95), started out to be an account of her relationship with her daughter by Ingmar Bergman, Linn, now a student at New York University. It became instead a more embracing meditation on those choices at mid-life.

“It doesn’t have to be a crisis,” Ullmann said during a quick visit to Los Angeles last week. “You can see it as a wonderful opportunity to come alive. I feel more active in my mind than I ever was before.”

She deals, again with candor, with some rising dissatisfactions with acting, brought to a boil by a traumatic run in “Mama,” a musical version by Richard Rodgers of “I Remember Mama.”

Its displeasures included an unsympathetic (and tactfully unidentified) director, some stagings that gave her a pail for a prop and positionings that made her an extra, and a man who showed up regularly every Thursday to boo her at the curtain call. (She is convinced he was paid to do it.) It was demoralizing, although she now says, philosophically, “I’ll be able to tell my grandchildren I was in Richard Rodgers’ last musical.”

Still, “Mama” led to a life-changing experience. The company and other Broadway artists raised $200,000 for the International Rescue Committee, and Liv presented the check. She asked Leo Cherne, the organization’s chairman, what more she could do, and he proposed that she visit some refugee camps.

She shortly found herself marching along a trail in Thailand, at the Cambodian border, confronting the anguish of the refugees from the Khmer Rouge terrors. She went on to camps on Macao, where the Vietnamese boat people sought refuge, and Hong Kong. She wrote in her journal: “Thank you God for giving me this journey. I promise I will return the gift.”

She has made several trips since, to 30 countries, including Ethiopia, Mali and Sudan in Africa, flying in ancient DC-3s and wheezing helicopters, expecting more than once that this is where it all would end, in an African desert.

She travels on behalf of UNICEF principally, but her larger cause is the plight of the refugees generally and she has highest praise for the presence and the efficiency not only of UNICEF but of the International Rescue Committee and Catholic Relief Services.

Her vignettes from her travels are profoundly moving. In the camp on Macao, she cradles a very old woman who has leprosy and cries continuously. The crying ceases, and the woman gives a childlike sigh of contentment. The actress can’t help thinking of her own grandmother, whom she had also embraced in illness, at what seems in every sense the opposite end of the world. She moves along, reluctantly, and the old woman resumes her crying.

In “Choices,” Ullmann also chronicles the end of a love affair with an Eastern European film maker she identifies only as Abel. He sounds like a man who carries defeat like a contagion and, love him as she evidently did or does, she had to cut loose or become a victim of his paralyzing pessimism.

“Reading it between covers,” she says, “I realized just how personal and candid it was. But if you’re doing an honest look at yourself, you have to present yourself as you are. I think women will recognize him.”

The most satisfying change in the actress’s life has at that been less a choice than an evolution in her relationship with her daughter, Linn, who, having done some modeling and presumed that her own choice of acting was inevitable, has discovered ideas and writing.

“She now even occasionally asks me if I would go to her lectures with her. A year ago the idea that she might want to be accompanied by her awful mother would have been out of the question,” her mother says, smiling luminously.

“She talks with me. Actually it is mostly a monologue. She gives me Plato’s view. I get to talk with the great philosophers.”

“Choices,” Ullmann says, “are the dilemma of the world, and one part of it is the dialogue between men and women, which is so often two monologues with no one listening.”

She is still on a journey to discover who she really is. “I don’t want to be defined by the applause or the boos,” she says. “I want to be defined by what I am.”

In her book she says: “I am not out to change the world, I do not even understand what will change the world. I only know that some traces of us are left behind, although the stages of our journey are different.” And the implicit testimony of her book is that those traces ought to reflect, if they can, the best of us.