Star Enters Another Stage in Long Career : Theater: Bibi Andersson discovers a happy homecoming when she returns to the Royal Dramatic Theater, where she began as a teen-ager.

Ingmar Bergman, who has defined the soul-probing possibilities of the motion picture as profoundly as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have demonstrated its powers of spectacle, turned 75 on Bastille Day.

The American Film Institute paid him tribute a few days ahead of the birthday by dedicating the closing night of AFI fest to him, showing “Sunday’s Children,” a film written by Bergman and directed by his son, Daniel, and “Wild Strawberries,” the 1957 film that helped establish Bergman’s international reputation.

“Wild Strawberries” also established the international reputation of Bibi Andersson, who was one of its stars and who flew in from Stockholm to represent Bergman at the AFI tribute.

She was also honored at a small luncheon hosted by Women in Film.

“I was really moved by it,” Andersson said, “because I got the feeling that these women, representing many fields although there were just 20 of them in the room, have among their qualities that they help other women--after the men have helped each other for so long.”

Bergman, Andersson says, “is younger than ever.”

“Now he runs around making plans for the future. He had a bad hip a couple of years ago and I was worried; he really looked old. Then he had an operation on it and he is fine.”

Bergman recently directed an opera based on Euripides’ “The Baccants” for the stage and then for television. A production of “Peer Gynt,” which Bergman directed at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater and in which Andersson appeared, ran for four performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in May. “Only four,” she explains, “because we played in Swedish and you can’t fill an audience in New York that often.”

Bergman had discovered Andersson as she finished at the Royal Dramatic Theater school, and their first footage together was a soap commercial. She went with him to Malmo, Sweden, where he was directing at the civic theater. He first cast her in his film “Smiles of a Summer Night” in 1955, when she was only 20 (she is 57 now), and thereafter in “The Seventh Seal,” “Wild Strawberries,” “The Magician,” “So Close to Life,” “The Devil’s Eye,” “All These Women,” “Persona,” “The Touch,” “The Passion of Anna,” “The Face” and “Scenes From a Marriage”--an amazing filmography within her larger list of credits.

She was indeed one of that extraordinary quartet of women who helped make Bergman so effective an interpreter of the Angst and confusion in the lives of contemporary women: Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Thulin and Harriet Andersson.

Working with Bergman was problematic, in Andersson’s word, especially in the early days when he was both a parental figure and a romantic figure in her life. He was already a towering creative personality. “But he wanted, and he wants, independent people around him,” she says.

The complication at the beginning was that Andersson was working not so much to establish her independence as to arrive at a clear understanding of herself--”who I am and where I stand, what are my beliefs, what I am good at, what I am not so good at.”

The self-searchings also affected her attitude toward directors generally. “A director is an authority and you relate to him as a parental figure. If you have trouble with that, you have trouble with directors. If you love it, it’s good for you. My working with Bergman now is very positive. I have no trouble working with him as a parental figure.”

The enduring truth, Andersson says, is that “we shouldn’t give too much power to other people. Then they become dangerous. But we create them, they don’t create us. Bergman never asked to have power over us. We shouldn’t create monuments out of other people and think that that will help us to live. We have to create monuments out of our own lives, however pitiful they are. At least, identify who you are, and start from there.”

Bergman has returned to the stage, and so now has Bibi Andersson, and it has been a very happy homecoming for her. “I didn’t want to spend my life waiting for film projects that don’t come about. It’s humiliating and it doesn’t fit you. It’s wonderful when you’re young and it can mean something in your career and whatever you want out of life,” she says. “But when I went back to Sweden and the theater, I was fed up with films and films were fed up with me, so it was a mutual parenthesis.”

For Andersson, the great critical successes at the start of her career were both heady stuff and a mixed blessing. “I made films when I was very young that became classics,” she says. “That’s wonderful and it’s nice to be connected with that, but it’s also something I had to outgrow. . . . It was complicated when I needed to make money, because I had too good a name--but not for being commercial. People didn’t forgive me if I did inferior stuff.”

She made a Western, “Duel at Diablo,” with James Garner and Sidney Poitier, and an espionage thriller, “The Kremlin Letter,” in Rome with John Huston. She enjoyed both films but she was not often offered films like that, probably because her identification with the Bergmanian intensities was so strong.

She is now again a member of the ensemble at the Royal Dramatic Theater, back where she had begun as a teen-ager. She receives a year-round salary, modest in comparison to film wages but secure in a way film wages never are. More important, the climate of personal and group creativity is deeply satisfying to Andersson.

Not long ago the theater managers proposed that the company in effect do some brainstorming about August Strindberg and create some innovative production ideas. “It was this lovely initiative because Strindberg is this national monument which we hardly care about anymore,” Andersson says. “So he was a little bit reborn. I said, ‘We have to talk about his wives--the woman as a muse and interpreter--and his interesting women.’ ”

Andersson and two other actresses, having read widely about the playwright’s life as well as his work, created three monologues and some sketchy, humorous scenes and performed them in a cafe theater.

The project was another kind of homecoming because she finds close comparisons between Strindberg and Bergman, who, like Strindberg, uses “everything around him, whatever there was, whoever he met, whatever he saw, as material for him to make stories out of. As, in fact, both creators drew on the lives of the women they knew, or in Bergman’s case, know.”

The collective creativity, as in the Strindberg inventions, is part of the reward of coming back to the stage for Andersson, but so is the rediscovery of the electricity between actor and audience.

“Being onstage is a heightened life experience,” she says. “I suddenly felt it after I’d been away. Then I did Strindberg’s ‘The Creditors,’ a very small scene. But we had such fun. And it came back to me--why I had wanted to do this in the beginning, to experience this concentration. Onstage you have to concentrate, you have to be there, have to live the situation. You have an identification with the role but also a total awareness of what you’re doing. Suddenly it’s a very nice feeling: tense and energetic.

“So I understand that acting is like a life essence, very important for some people, and very scary if you don’t reach it. And every once in a while it comes to you as a gift.”

For Andersson, acting becomes more than a craft and a profession. It gives her, she says, “a sort of boundary, an identity, something to trust and believe in. It’s surely a sort of vague thing to trust. But I say to myself, it’s meaningful to do what I do. It’s not the only meaningful thing on Earth, but it’s not meaningless.”

The question becomes, how is acting meaningful, and Andersson has given a good deal of thought to that. “I don’t believe that politically we have much of an impact. But maybe if people can recognize somebody else’s destiny, somebody else’s problem, somebody else’s standards, it becomes something to lean on, a kind of security, something to identify with.

“So actors become professional human beings in a way, and we get paid for it. But it’s a big responsibility, because I wouldn’t want to give people phony things to identify with. I don’t want the kind of stardom that makes people think you are much bigger than they are, from a dreamland. That’s very confusing. Better to remain identified with who you were originally and who you are profoundly.”

Andersson has done some minor directing. But in the Royal Dramatic Theater there is a sharp division between acting and directing and doing both is discouraged. For the moment, at least, Andersson is happy to go on acting.

“Today it’s easier for me to do a part where I recognize something that I’ve lived. But I’m also more mature in terms of wanting to tell a story that’s important for other people to watch, and not merely important for me to play.”

“Acting is not the end of the world for me. I would never cry for a part, never miss a part. I mean, it’s all a journey. It comes if it’s time for it to come. There are so many ways to be creative.”