Ingrid Bergman

Ingrid Bergman: The Face Hollywood Declined to Fix

On March 14, 1950, a United States senator rose on the floor of the chamber to discuss a pregnant Swedish actress. Edwin C. Johnson called Ingrid Bergman "a powerful influence for evil" and accused her of perpetrating "an assault upon the institution of marriage." She had, at that point, won an Academy Award, played Ilsa Lund, and made three films for Alfred Hitchcock. She would not work in Hollywood again for six years. When she came back she won a second Oscar.

An Orphan in Stockholm

She was born on August 29, 1915, in Stockholm, to a Swedish father, Justus Samuel Bergman, and a German mother, Frieda Adler, from Kiel. Her mother died before she was three. Her father died of stomach cancer in 1929, when she was fourteen, leaving her to be passed among relatives. The self-possession that reviewers later mistook for serenity was assembled early and under pressure.

She attended the Palmgrenska Samskolan, won a scholarship to the Royal Dramatic Training Academy, and left after a single year in 1932 to take paid work at Svensk Filmindustri. She made eleven Swedish films before she turned twenty-five. The one that mattered was *Intermezzo* (1936), her first lead, opposite Gösta Ekman. Its director, Gustaf Molander, put the matter with unusual honesty: "I created Intermezzo for her, but I was not responsible for its success."

The Face Selznick Refused to Fix

David O. Selznick brought her to Hollywood for the English-language remake, *Intermezzo: A Love Story* (1939), and immediately confronted the standard problem: the accent was wrong, the eyebrows were too thick, the whole apparatus of the studio makeup department was waiting. He left her alone. The decision defined her career and, arguably, a whole register of screen acting. She went through thirty years of American film largely unretouched, and the industry rebuilt its idea of glamour partly around the anomaly.

Ilsa, and the Peak Years

*Casablanca* (1942) made her permanent. *For Whom the Bell Tolls* (1943) brought her first Best Actress nomination, and *Gaslight* (1944) her first Oscar — a performance built entirely out of a woman being persuaded she is losing her mind, which required her to play deterioration without ever signalling that she knew it was happening. *The Bells of St. Mary's* followed in 1945.

Hitchcock used her three times, in *Spellbound* (1945), *Notorious* (1946) and *Under Capricorn* (1949), and got from her the quality he valued most: a surface of complete composure with something moving underneath it. She played *Joan of Arc* on screen in 1948 and took a Tony Award for the stage version.

Stromboli, and the Senate Floor

In 1950, filming *Stromboli* on the volcanic island for Roberto Rossellini, she became pregnant by him. Both were married to other people. The revelation detonated. Hate mail arrived in volume; Ed Sullivan declined to have her on his programme; Johnson delivered his speech; and Hollywood, which had sold her as the image of sincerity, discovered it could not sell a scandal. She was effectively exiled. Steve Allen, who did eventually host her, named the underlying error precisely: "the danger of trying to judge artistic activity through the prism of one's personal life."

She divorced the neurosurgeon Petter Lindström, whom she had married in 1937 and with whom she had a daughter, Pia, and married Rossellini on May 24, 1950.

The Italian Exile

The films she made with her second husband were commercial disasters and are now the most influential work either of them did. *Europa '51* (1952) won her the Volpi Cup at Venice. *Journey to Italy* (1954) helped set the terms of the French New Wave; its admirers included Godard, Fellini and Antonioni. She also made *Fear* (1954) and staged *Joan of Arc at the Stake* in 1953. The marriage produced three children — Robin in 1950, and the twins Isotta Ingrid and Isabella in 1952 — and ended in divorce in 1957 after Rossellini's own affair.

Anastasia, and After

*Anastasia* (1956) returned her to Hollywood and won her a second Academy Award. Bosley Crowther called it "a beautifully molded performance, worthy of an Academy Award and particularly gratifying in the light of Miss Bergman's long absence from commendable films" — a sentence that manages both apology and condescension. In 1958 she married the Swedish theatrical producer Lars Schmidt, and stayed married to him for the rest of her life.

The late career was various rather than consistent: *Indiscreet* (1958) with Cary Grant, *The Inn of the Sixth Happiness*, an Emmy for television's *The Turn of the Screw* (1960), *Cactus Flower* (1969), and a third Oscar for *Murder on the Orient Express* (1974). Her last film was *Autumn Sonata* (1978), directed by the unrelated Ingmar Bergman, which brought her seventh and final Best Actress nomination. Stanley Kauffmann wrote that "the astonishment is Bergman's performance," that she was "exalted in the hands of a master."

Why Ingrid Is Called a Genius

The claim here is about craft and physical instrument, not intellect, and it should be said plainly. Bergman was no theorist of acting and left no method behind her. What she had was a specific technical gift: the ability to play an interior state without indicating it. In *Gaslight* she performs a woman being driven mad and never lets the audience see the actress managing the descent. In *Notorious* she holds composure over terror so exactly that the tension has nowhere to escape. Reviewers reached repeatedly for the same vocabulary — "freshness and simplicity and natural dignity" in the New York Times, "charm, sincerity" and "infectious vivaciousness" in Variety. Add the range: she acted in Swedish, English, German, Italian and French, and was credible in all five.

The counter-case is worth stating. Naturalness on screen is partly a fact about a face and a camera, not an achievement of mind, and Selznick's decision to leave her unretouched was a marketing insight as much as an artistic one. Her Rossellini films, now canonical, failed on release and puzzled contemporary critics. Plenty of her later work — *Cactus Flower*, *A Walk in the Spring Rain* — is undistinguished. Three Oscars, two Emmys and a Tony make her the youngest performer to complete the Triple Crown of Acting and one of only four actresses with three or more acting Academy Awards. That is sustained excellence. Whether it is genius depends on whether transparency counts as a form of thought.

Legacy

Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1974, she went on working. Her last role was Golda Meir in *A Woman Called Golda* (1982), filmed through severe illness, and it won her a posthumous Emmy that her daughter Pia collected. She died on August 29, 1982, her sixty-seventh birthday. The American Film Institute later ranked her the fourth-greatest female screen legend of classic Hollywood. Her daughter Isabella Rossellini became an actress in turn. What survives is not only the films but the precedent: the star who refused the makeup, survived the Senate, and outlasted everyone who tried to define her.