Hans Alfredson


Hans Folke "Hasse" Alfredson was a Swedish actor, film director, writer and comedian. He was born in Malmö, Sweden. He is known for his collaboration with Tage Danielsson as the duo Hasse & Tage and their production company AB Svenska Ord. His most celebrated contribution to their brand of humorist humanism was his ability to extemporize wildly absurd comic situations, for example in the Lindeman dialogues.
Already in 1970 he gave a taste of another and less comedic side in the role as an rather unpleasant civil servant in Grisjakten. As time went by, Alfredson more or less totally turned around to become a serious author and film director. In 1982 he both directed and participated in the film The Simple-Minded Murderer, a motion picture based on his own novel "En ond man". Here Alfredson portrayed a rich and indeed very unpleasant manufacturer and Nazi-supporter who tormented the inhabitants of his native Scanian country-side in the 1930s. With just a brief return to a revue comedy in 1984, he never returned to that genre after the 1985 death of Tage Danielsson. Between 1992 and 1994 he was manager of the cultural museum "Skansen" at Stockholm. In the mid-00s he participated in the Danish criminal-odyssey The Eagle playing the pivotal role of the protagonist Hallgrim "The Eagle" Hallgrimsson's father, whose childhood trauma at his hands is recurrent throughout the series. His last cinematic work was the 2009 adaption of Stieg Larsson's novel The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, directed by one of his two sons, Daniel Alfredson. The pair came together on Swedish television discussing their collaboration and the elder Alfredsson's role as a rogue Swedish Security Police operative, including staging his violent death on the set.
Towards the end of his life, Alfredson made it clear that he strongly preferred his real name – Hans – not the rather commonly nickname "Hasse".

Career

At the 11th Guldbagge Awards, he won the Best Director award for his 1975 film Egg! Egg! A Hardboiled Story. His 1981 film The Simple-Minded Murderer won three awards at the 18th Guldbagge Awards and was entered into the 32nd Berlin International Film Festival. His 1985 film False as Water won the award for Best Director at the 21st Guldbagge Awards.
Between 1992 and 1994, Hans Alfredson was head of the open-air museum Skansen in Stockholm. He also wrote a string of books, some intensely comic in a Monty Python style, some equally intensely tragic, some a mixture of the two.
He was the father of directors Daniel and Tomas Alfredson.

Selected works

Acting