Sofia Margareta Götschenhjelm Helin (born 25 April 1972) is a Swedish actress best known for the Guldbagge Award nomination she got for her role in Dalecarlians (Swedish: Masjävlar), and for her role as Saga Norén in the Danish/Swedish co-produced TV series The Bridge.
Sofia Helin was born in Hovsta in Örebro, Närke. Her father was a salesman and her mother was a nurse. When she was six years old her brother and grandmother were killed in a car accident which she said in 2014 still affected her. She graduated with a degree in philosophy from Lund University.[2] From 1994-1996, she went to Calle Flygares theatre school and graduated from the Stockholm Theatre Academy in 2001. She lives in Linghem, outside Linköping. She is married to Daniel Gotschenhjelm, a priest in the Church of Sweden and former actor. She has two children - a boy Ossian and a girl Nike who were ten and four years old respectively in 2014.
She has appeared in several films, including At Point Blank (Rånarna) where she had the leading role of Chief Inspector Klara. In 2004, she had another leading role as Mia in Masjävlar. It was in that movie that she made her breakthrough. In 2007, she got a further leading role as Cecilia Algottsdotter in Arn, an adaptation of Jan Guillou's The Knight Templar, about Arn Magnusson. She is also included in the Swedish animated film Metropia, which was released in the cinema in October 2009.
Since 2012 she has become more famous outside Sweden as a result of her role in the crime drama The Bridge, in which she played the lead role of Saga Norén, homicide detective from Malmö. In the UK the series attracted more than a million viewers per episode.
Sofia's facial scar was caused by a cycling accident when she was 24.
