[1] Tommy William Berggren was born on 12 August 1937, in Mölndal, Sweden, an impoverished working class district on the country's west coast.

In Stefan Jarl's 2002 film The Bricklayer, a documentary about Berggren's life and career, he recounted an incident in which he had walked a great distance to meet his father at a train station, only to discover that he had not kept the appointment with his son.

[5] He later directed plays at the Stockholm City Theatre, including August Strindberg's Miss Julie and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

Like Berggren, Widerberg strongly believed that films needed to focus on human relationships, have a greater political significance, and be socially conscious.

[7] As early as 1960, Berggren declared in an interview that he only wanted to do films that he could truly stand for, to play people who developed – an attitude he has maintained through the years.

Berggren portrayed Anders, a young aspiring writer who finds his hopes and dreams dashed upon the reality of an impoverished existence.

In 1889, the pair willfully abandoned their respective lives for each other, but after spending a brief time in Denmark, the couple exhausted their limited finances and the doomed relationship ended in suicide.

Widerberg shot the film on a low budget, in natural light and without a script, allowing the actors to improvise freely and to take their time delivering their dialogue.

[8] Berggren continued to focus on mainly Swedish productions, including a 1969 television adaptation of August Strindberg's play Miss Julie, about the class struggle between a count's daughter and his man servant, Jean.

In 1971, he worked once again with Bo Widerberg in a tribute to labor, Joe Hill, a film based upon the life of the Swedish–American agitator who helped to forward the worker's rights movement in the early 1900s.

[4] Berggren's career on stage and screen continued to be influenced heavily by the "underdog syndrome", which he openly discussed in Stefan Jarl's The Bricklayer.

[5] In an interview with the publication Expressen, Berggren noted that class struggle had been one of the strongest driving forces in his work, stating, "It is with me and it is within Persbrandt and it was in Strindberg.