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Knut Wigert 1943.
Knut Hansen was born in Skien, Norway, on 3rd October 1916, the son of an army major. In 1935, he changed his surname to Wigert in homage to his sister, the actress Sonja Wigert. Graduating from Oslo Commercial School in 1936, he began his acting career with small parts on stage and screen before joining the National Theatre in Oslo in 1938. After making his film debut in 1940, he secured a major role in the anti-Nazi play Matka, which reached the dress rehearsal stage but never premiered due to the German invasion of Norway on 8th April 1940.
The Germans rapidly defeated the Norwegian forces and British troops sent to counter the invasion. Wigert was one of hundreds of patriotic young men who travelled to Britain either on merchant ships or transported by the Royal Navy as the expeditionary force was evacuated. He joined Captain Martin Linge’s Norwegian Independent Company 1 (NORIC 1), organised in March 1941 under the British SOE to take the fight to the Germans in Norway. However, the bland NORIC 1 had little appeal in occupied Norway, so the unit soon became known as Kompani Linge. The unit took part in Operation Claymore, the commando raid on the Lofoten Islands, which resulted in the destruction of several ships, the capture of 228 Germans, as well as the recruitment of another 314 loyal Norwegians. Wigert took part in a second raid, on Måløy (Operation Archery), which resulted in the sinking of another ten ships as well as 200 Germans killed or captured, but at the cost of Linge, who was killed.
As the tide of the war turned and the Allies prepared for the invasion of Europe, men from several European Allies serving with SOE were sent to Sandhurst for officer training, and Wigert was commissioned on 3rd September 1944. After the war, he had a long stage and screen career, specialising in roles from the works of Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian playwright and one of the founders of modernism on the stage. In 1990, Wigert rented the apartment that Ibsen had lived in and started to reassemble
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