Kupé, November 2010
By: CAROLINE ENGVALL
Photo: YLVA SUNDGREN
Always happy, always friendly. Sure, but behind Helen Sjöholm’s girl-cozy facade there is uncertainty, poor self-esteem, existential pondering and reflections on everyday problems. Perhaps even more so now when she plays Aniara at the City Theatre.
Sven Wollter rests a heavy hand on Helen Sjöholm’s shoulder. Both are taking small, rhythmical, steps forward. Soon the rest of the team of actors follow. Slowly. Zombie-like. All of it to the tunes of Andreas Kleerup’s space music.
Helen Sjöholm wears soft gray pants, comfortable black boots and a blue sweater tied around the hips. When she sings, time comes to a halt.
It’s Tuesday morning in September, just before the lunch break. Yawning begins to spread among actors such as Helge Skoog and Iwa Boman, before director Lars Rudolfsson lets them off to the staff lunchroom on 9th floor.
Helen Sjöholm chooses chicken without rice, yogurt instead of mango sauce. The health preparation for the premiere of Harry Martinson’s Aniara, which is supposed to draw full houses for Stockholm’s City Theatre’s 50 year anniversary, has now begun. Everything has to be on top. The body. The voice. The self-confidence.
A week earlier, we sat huddled in a gruff couch backstage at the theatre. Few would have recognized the singer, who were on the Swedish charts for 278 weeks, who has played the lead role in ”Kristina från Duvemåla” for four years, who appeared in Oscar-nominated ”As it is in heaven”.
She walks through the stage door at the Stockholm City Theatre with her bike-helmet in hand. Bruises on her forearm after rehearsals. Her face as unadorned as the emotions she is soon about to bury herself in. But let’s make one thing clear from the beginning. The singer and actress Helen Sjöholm is actually a very happy type. She laughs a lot. Likes to play monkey a bit.
But.
People would be pale without fierce, burning feelings. Songs would be flat without depth. Therefore, this interview is not meant to reflect a cheerful and shiny artist-facade. It’s hard to be sparkling when talking about the vision of the future that Harry Martinson’s 50th century epic Aniara displays. The story takes place in a spacecraft passing from a ruined Earth towards the big Nothing and can be seen as a symbol of the human civilization.
Helen plays the blind Poetissan, a woman without eye-sight who has got the gift of the word and the song. With those she comforts her fellow passengers, gets them to recognize that there is meaning in the hopelessness, the emptiness, the fear that soon they shall continue out into space and die.
And as part of such a dramatic story it’s obviously impossible not to think about life. Especially if you are even an ounce of a pondering type.
– Yes, I think a lot about existential questions, how little we know about our future. The entire ensemble kind of halts and start talking about big questions. I think a lot about the environmental threat, that suddenly everything can be turned upside down. Acting in this kind of play makes one think about what is truly important.
– For me that’s family and closeness. Through that I create my own purpose in the big picture.
Then what do you think about the big question: The meaning of life?
– I say like my father: ”Life is a bag – empty and meaningless if you don’t fill it with something.” To fill the bag with things I like makes life worth living for me. It’s family, friends, being out in the nature (the best therapy!) and my work that I also love.
– And trying to be a conscious and kind human being in the meantime.
And what do you believe happens after death?
– I sometimes feel a strong presence of people who were dear to me, but who are gone now. However, I sense them more like a resonance within me. I don’t believe in a concrete life after this. The consciousness is extinguished, but the dust gives new life in the extension. Beautiful like that.
Of course, there is a wild tousled rascal as cause for these reflections. His name is Ruben, and he boxed his way into mama Helen’s heart three years ago, knockouting her with his love and bringing her life to a head. As the modern and hardworking mother she is she’s torn between work and family. Won’t opt out. Cannot shut out the feeling of not being enough for her greatest love.
– Having a child has made me an even more pondering person. It’s hard when you want to let your child roam and still be close to them. How do one get this together?
Helen tells about the fun but pressed working year, on which she has just spent all of her energy to get through. Talks about how she would have wanted to take it easy in the spring, but then came the part as the mother Karin Larsson in the movie ”Simon and the oaks”, a part she just couldn’t refuse. The result was a kick work wise – but a struggle inside with her inner ideals. How moms should be there for their children twentyfour-seven, always available.
– This new thing, when you have children, is constantly planning by the millimeter. It’s an unsexy equation but totally inevitable. I know it’s worth it. I love my job, but work hasn’t been that vitaly important since I had children. At the same time my work depends on that I think it is just that important, but I try to get better at being totally present on stage and then let it all go at home. Though I’m not there yet.
– Meanwhile, life as a parent has also enriched me with a new anxiety and fear, while the humor and presence has grown. Everything gets a bigger dimension and makes it easier to identify with anxiety, longing and fear, but also love and humor. Every room inside me has become bigger since Ruben.
Helen made her brake through at the age of 25 in Björn and Benny’s musical ”Kristina från Duvemåla”. Full steam ahead for four years. Then she jumped onboard musicals such as ”Fiddler on the Roof”, ”Les Miserables” and ”Chess”. Tour with Benny Andersson’s Orkester BAO. Film roles in ”Där regnbågen slutar” and ”As it is in Heaven”. Rarely paused. Has been close to the famous wall many times.
– Two years ago when we moved and renovated the house, and I started working again, I had a very tough time. Moving in with a one-year-old in a house as unfinished as it was, and having had two such houses in the past, it was very tough. I only slept and worked.
– But I had good support and was able to attend some rehearsals and rest whenever I wanted to. I air myself frequently in my work, maybe that’s the reason I find it hard to be vacant for long periods. Singing has been my channel and I have always filled the words with things going on inside me.
Helen knows what medicine she needs. Says she’s a combusting person whose signs become apparent only when the collision is a fact. Therefore she learned how to slow puncture herself. She releases some of the pressure while walking or running. Not every day, but several times a week. But singing at home? Never!
– I hardly listen to music at home. The only time I sing at home is with Ruben, right now we are singing a strange version of ”Ooa hela natten”.
Though it won’t be on Helen’s new album, coming out this autumn. The idea to the album was born one evening at home on the couch when she and her husband ran a music quiz.
– He’s amused by that I never can make a correct guess. That evening we got stuck on Billy Joel songs and listened through his treasure of music from the 70- and 80’s. Then I got the idea to record them in Swedish.
It was about the same in the living room at home in Sundsvall. There Helen sang. All the time. The accent is still there, it breaks through from time to time. The round, coarser letter l’s. She says she’s had it very well. Two wonderful siblings, no sore childhood. In Sundsvall a talented, but not TOO talented, Helen Sjöholm went to Höglundaskolan in the early 80’s.
– It was not super easy for me, but I liked to study. I had a harmonious childhood, but I have also felt like an outsider and I have had periods in my youth when I didn’t fit in. I didn’t ride when all the others did. I had friends but I wasn’t one of the gang. Before high school I never felt at home in any environment besides the singing.
I read on the net about the wild high school club Athena…
Helen laughs, tells about teenage life with happy party days every weekend in the girl-club Athena.
– There were tough admission tests… bullying really, incredibly American. One week of humiliation. It was fun years but seen from the outside it must look very strange. Today I would get nightmares if Ruben would be in such an association.
What is your son like?
– He is funny, very funny. He runs small shows and hates it when I sing, he wants to sing himself. ”Hush, now its meeee”, he says. And then he takes over.
Ruben’s father David, Helen’s great love, came into her life seven years ago, in a period when the desire to work centrifuged at high speed. Lasse Berghagen had just persuaded her to play in a revue and managed to turn Helen’s no into a yes.
– I really had no thought of playing revue. I had just done Chess and it was a heavy period when I had just broken off a relationship. But when I turned it down Lasse said ”why don’t you do it just for the fun of it, take it as a big joke!”. Today I’m so glad that I dared to try, it was a big step in my development. David worked as a sound technician at Hamburger Börs and I had been checking him out for a while before I took him home, she says with a laugh.
That’s her way. Laps precipice with high laughs. She’s a true body contact person who likes to touch people around her and spreads warmth through humor and acting talent. Though she rarely wants to watch herself on TV or movie.
– That’s right. I have more confidence than self-esteem. When I listen to myself I get overly critical. I have seen too many pictures of myself in this job. I don’t want to know how I look when I sing, it restricts me. I should be able to shrug it off, but I can’t.
The question is wether Helen Sjöholm really should. Songs would, as said, be flat without depth.
FACTS HELEN SJÖHOLM
Name: Marie Helen Sjöholm Granditsky
Age: 40 years
Family: Husband David, sound engineer. Together they have a son Ruben, 3.5 years old
Current projects: As the blind Poetissa in Stockholm City Theatre set of Aniara. In November, new album with Billy Joel songs, interpreted by Tomas Andersson Wij.
Interests: “I find it hard to be completely unscheduled, I should really practice that. When I’m not working I have a lot of projects at home as wallpapering and painting.”
Best train memory: Seven years ago, I and a friend went by overnight train from northern to southern Vietnam. We booked first class because we thought that it was better, but it was an awful trip. The only luxury was that there were walls. Soldiers searched the train, it was scary. But it was really beautiful when we arrived. Here in Sweden I and my son Ruben travel by train very often, and then we are housed in the dining car.