Bodil Ipsen

Biography

Bodil Ipsen arrived in the world on 30 August 1889 in Copenhagen, and spent the next seventy-five years turning Danish stages and screens into her personal playground. Audiences first felt her sting as the merciless parole officer in Café Paradis (1950), then shivered through the war-torn tragedy of Red Meadows (1945) and sailed with the wartime suspense of The Viking Watch of the Danish Seaman (1948). Between curtain calls and clapperboards she collected four husbands—Ejnar Black, Emanuel Gregers, Helmuth Heinrich Otto Moltke, and Jacob Texière—each marriage a new act in an eventful private drama. When the final curtain fell on 26 November 1964, Denmark lost the woman who had directed and performed her way into the nation’s cultural bloodstream.