Anders Mordal

Anders Mordal is a member of an exclusive club in the little country of Norway: he started out as a child actor and not only decided to follow that craft into adulthood but has also managed to make a wealthy living on it.

Mordal grew up in the Oslo suburb of Oppsal. As a 12-year old he got chosen to play the lead part in the drama film "Vårnatt" (Spring Night) based on the book by popular Norwegian author Tarjei Vesaas. A story about a boy and his older sister who, when left alone one night, are visited by a dysfunctional family who seeks refuge from the rain after their car breaks down. It demanded a lot from debuting screen actor Mordal whose young character mainly carried the picture, but he pulled it off convincingly all, though the movie itself did only so-so with Norwegian cinemagoers. Two years later he got his second lead and then in a much more successful movie: "Operasjon Cobra" was a rare entry in the (at the time) drab Norwegian film industry as it told the action-filled story about Mordal's character whose family are taken hostage on account of them living close to Oslo International Airport, the criminals being in fact terrorists plotting to assassinate the US Secretary of State who is about to arrive in Norway! It is up to Mordal to find a way to communicate with his friends on the outside world despite being held prisoner in his own home, so they together can save the day. The movie was targeted mainly at teens and was a box office hit with its target audience, still entertaining after all these years.

"Operasjon Cobra" seemed to be the last anyone had ever heard or seen of Anders Mordal until the late 1980s when he suddenly started appearing on stage around the country. Soon he would be a regular at Norway's National Theatre co-starring with the greatest stage actors of their generation in everything from Ibsen to Shakespeare and even a costly 2001 staging of The Three Musketeers. In the 1990s he again started to show his face, guest-starring on several TV shows in everything from sketch comedy to serious drama, and in 2002 he had his greatest commercial success since his teens, co-starring in the popular show "Brigaden", about a squad of firemen in Oslo. Around the same time he also got attention starring in some noticable commercials on nation-wide television.

Thus Anders Mordal had proven that he was a member of a very exclusive club indeed: an actor who in a country with barely 4 million people not only managed to make it safely from a career as a child actor, but also transforming into a professional adult actor, making a comfortable living in a line of career very few people succeed in.