Johanna Sällström made her first stage appearance in Hudiksvall at the age of 15, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She became famous in Sweden in the 1990s, after portraying the teenage girl Victoria Bärnsten in the soap opera Tre kronor. Thereafter, she appeared in numerous productions, and received a Guldbagge Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for the film Under ytan in 1997. Later that same year, unable to cope with her new-found celebrity, she took a break from filming and moved to Copenhagen, where she worked in a café. In 2000, Sällström returned to Sweden to continue her acting career. She did not enjoy the success of previous years until, in 2005, she played the role of detective constable Linda Wallander in the first season of the Swedish TV series Wallander. Johanna Sällström’s last role was in an Ystad theatre production of Anton Chekhov’s play The Seagull, which she left prematurely due to illness. Sällström married Albin Sällström in 2000; they were divorced in 2002, about a year after the birth of their daughter Talulah. In 2004, Sällström and Talulah experienced the 2004 tsunami while vacationing in Thailand.

Johanna Sällström was found dead in her Malmö home, from an overdose of sleeping pills, shortly before midnight on 13 February 2007. She had recently been released from a psychiatric unit where she had been receiving treatment for depression. Her lifelong struggle with depression was exacerbated by her harrowing experience in Thailand. In a 2006 interview with the editor of the magazine Tove, she said, “I always thought I would be dead by the age of 30.” Henning Mankell’s grief and guilt over her death prevented him from writing the last two novels of his projected Linda Wallander trilogy. In the second Wallander series produced for Swedish TV, his daughter was said to be working elsewhere.