When Erland Josephson enters as Gaev, brother of Lyubov, in Peter Brook's current production of The Cherry Orchard at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Majestic Theatre, American audiences may experience a Scandinavian-accented sense of déjà vu. A familiar face from nearly a dozen Ingmar Bergman films, including the director's most recent work, Fanny and Alexander, Mr. Josephson is making his American stage debut—indeed, his English-language stage debut—in an acting career that includes more than 100 plays.

As Gaev, the symbol of a self-deluding and obsolete aristocracy that eulogizes itself in the poetry of Anton Chekhov's play, Mr. Josephson walks the line of high tragicomedy, veering between foolishness and grace. He begins his Act I ode to a bookcase ("It's an inanimate object, but all the same it's a bookcase!") by pulling off a dust cover with the tentative elegance of a man in a trance. Soon he is off on one of Gaev's garrulous elegies until, overcome by his own emotions, he lapses into an embarrassed giggle, silenced at least for the moment. Frank Rich, writing in The New York Times last Monday, described this as "one of the evening's comic high points" in a production of the Chekhov work "that every theatregoer fantasizes about."

"Chekhov is very important in Sweden; there's some sort of affinity between the Russian and the Swedish soul," Mr. Josephson says. "Chekhov is very concerned with the light in the same way that Bergman is so sensitive to the light in his films. The way Chekhov describes the light coming down on the cherry orchard, it seems to me to be a very Nordic light, which in the morning is very clear and beautiful."

Mr. Josephson knows The Cherry Orchard well, both as actor and producer. He produced the play when he was director of Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre, and first appeared in the work in a municipal theatre in the 1950's in the role of the student Trofimov. Mr. Josephson says that Gaev was the only other role in the play that he imagined himself taking on.

"He's not admirable particularly," says the 64-year-old actor in near-fluent English, "but he's a nice failure and he's a poet, too. I have seen these kinds of people in my childhood and I was always fond of them. Everyone has a longing to keep his childhood. Gaev has in many ways remained a child. He likes to be taken care of. When the audience laughs at him, it's because they recognize this desire to escape from reality."

Mr. Josephson first met Peter Brook when the director invited him for coffee in Paris, where Mr. Josephson was filming a cameo role in Philip Kaufman's upcoming film, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, based on Milan Kundera's novel. "I had seen him in all of the Bergman films and in two Andrei Tarkovsky films [Nostalgia and The Sacrifice]," recalls Mr. Brook. "But it didn't occur to me to cast him in The Cherry Orchard until I saw him in person. To play Chekhov an actor must have not only a technical skill—which I knew he had from the films I had seen—but also an immeasurable personal depth, a deep heart and soul. This I saw when I met him in person, and then I asked him if he would be interested."

Mr. Josephson is probably best known to American audiences as Liv Ullmann's unfaithful husband in Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage, released here in 1974. His association with the great Swedish director goes back to Mr. Josephson's late adolescence. "When I first met Bergman I was 16 or 17, and he was five years older. We were boys who wanted to make theatre, and we put on The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummers Night's Dream. I remember it very well. Everything was there already. He was much more hysterical then—shouting, screaming, threatening, sometimes mean, which he still can sometimes be. But the fantasy, the imagination, the fantastic talent for getting close to a text—all of that was already there. In his first films you can see that he is not experienced, but in theatre he was already perfect."

Mr. Josephson, who appeared in several of the early Bergman films, such as Brink of Life and The Magician (both in 1958), says that he did not consider himself a film actor for the first 20 years of his career. "I thought it was not my business to make films," he says. "It was amusing, it was nice to be with the people, and I was interested in what was going on in the studio. But I was not interested in film acting until Cries and Whispers [1972], when I suddenly got something from it I had not gotten before. And when Bergman saw Liv Ullmann and I work together in that, he saw that we gave something to each other and he started to write Scenes From a Marriage because of it."

Scenes From a Marriage was a commercial breakthrough for both its director and star. According to published reports at the time, the six-part television movie brought practically every household in Sweden to its television set on successive Wednesday nights. There Mr. Bergman's countrymen pondered the dissolution of a marriage—and the emotional and sexual ties that continued to bind the husband and wife through divorce and its aftermath.

"We had very little money to make Scenes," says Mr. Josephson, "because Cries and Whispers, which I think is one of Bergman's masterpieces, was impossible to sell. No one wanted it. So we made Scenes very quickly, all of us together in primitive conditions on an island where Bergman lives, in a studio he had built there. It was only meant for TV. When it was shown in the cinema and it was a big success, it changed something. Because suddenly everyone knew that it was possible to make intimate, psychological films without much money and without spectacular events, catastrophes in the drama. Interest for me as a film actor increased."

Scenes From a Marriage was released here around the same time Mr. Josephson finished a nine-year term as head of the Royal Dramatic Theatre, a post he took over from Mr. Bergman in 1966. He was then free to travel, and he began making films with other international directors such as Dusan Makavejev (Montenegro).

Prior to Scenes From a Marriage, in which he was given a film role large enough to explore the contradictory aspects of a complex character, Mr. Josephson had tended to be cast by Bergman as brilliant but distinctly unpleasant men. "In Bergman's world I represented a sort of intellectual, skeptical, ironic person, rather cold and frustrated. When I went abroad and made films in Italy and other places, I was used in different ways. I was rather often cast as crazy people, maniacs. It was very good for me and it was fun because it is nice to play crazy people if you are not in reality. And I think perhaps that changed how Ingmar saw me. Suddenly I was on the more magical side of his world, playing the people with fantasies, variety, the artists."

Perhaps the best example of Mr. Josephson's evolution in the Bergman universe is to compare his roles in The Passion of Anna (1969) and Fanny and Alexander (1982). In the earlier movie, Mr. Josephson appears as Elis Vergerus, a sort of evil yuppie forebear whose wife describes his apathy toward her as "part of his general weariness." Vergerus is a successful architect and an amateur photographer whose extensive picture files are composed primarily of people engaged in acts of violence. As the contempt-ridden Vergerus, Mr. Josephson, at 46, has close-cropped brown hair and large ears, and looks chillingly smug and well fed.

By the time Mr. Bergman made Fanny and Alexander with so many of the people he had worked with for decades, Mr. Josephson played a character with beautiful curly locks, a sagelike beard and beneficent mystical powers. He engineers the rescue of the children, Fanny and Alexander, from a sadistic bishop—also named Vergerus (in the Bergman canon, that name always spells trouble). "In my career with Bergman," says Mr. Josephson, "you could say I moved in a very human direction.

"I think nobody at that moment believed that Fanny and Alexander would be Ingmar's final film, but he said it very often and he was absolutely serious. We were all comrades together and it was a very emotional, magical time over a long shooting period, longer than seven months. Ingmar usually made his films in about 38 days. The documentary [The Making of Fanny and Alexander] told only a little bit of it. Ingmar is always editing those views of himself so that you can see only a tiny part of him."

In Sweden, Mr. Josephson is also known as a writer and dramatist. He has published two books of poetry, six novels, a short-story collection and a number of scripts for stage, screen and radio. He co-authored the films The Pleasure Garden and Now About These Women with Mr. Bergman, using the pseudonym Buntel Eriksson. Currently he is working on a new play.

"I'm too impatient to wait for things to happen to me," he says. "If I should be out of work for two months I would go crazy. So as soon as I'm free I start writing. While it is necessary for me to write, I know that if I go too long without acting on the stage I don't feel well. Acting has a strong sensual quality that I get such a...you say kick in America? It's a fantastic profession in that way. I get crazy the first days of rehearsal, just loving everybody, loving the stage, loving the house. The feeling is not as strong in a film studio—there's something magical about the space in the theatre. You know you will be in it and that real things will happen there."