Ingrid Bergman

Ingrid Bergman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, on 29 August 1915, the only surviving child of Justus Bergman, a Swedish photographer and shopkeeper, and his German wife, Friedel Adler ^[1]. Her mother died when Ingrid was not yet three years old, and her father, who had encouraged her early love of performance and photographed her constantly, died when she was thirteen. She then lived with relatives, first an aunt who died within months and afterward an uncle's family ^[2].

Despite the losses that shaped her childhood, Bergman later recalled that acting gave her a refuge. She was a tall, shy girl who came alive when pretending to be someone else. At seventeen she won a place at the Royal Dramatic Theatre School in Stockholm, the same institution that had trained Greta Garbo, beating out a large field of applicants with an audition that impressed the judges enough to cut it short because they had already decided to accept her ^[1].

She did not stay long. Swedish film studios noticed her quickly, and within a year she left the school to work in pictures full time. Between 1935 and 1938 she appeared in a string of Swedish films, learning the mechanics of screen acting at a pace that theatre training could not match ^[3].

The film that changed everything was Intermezzo (1936), a Swedish romantic drama directed by Gustaf Molander in which Bergman played a young pianist who falls in love with a married violinist. The picture traveled well beyond Scandinavia, and a print eventually reached the American producer David O. Selznick, who was then assembling talent for his independent studio ^[2].

Selznick brought Bergman to Hollywood in 1939 to star in an English-language remake, Intermezzo: A Love Story, opposite Leslie Howard. He also made an unusual decision for the era: rather than reshaping her with plucked eyebrows, capped teeth, and a new name, he presented her essentially as she was. Publicity emphasized her freshness and lack of heavy makeup, and American audiences responded to a screen personality that felt unstudied and direct ^[2][4].

Her rise over the next three years was rapid. She played against type as a barmaid in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), having persuaded the studio to let her swap roles with Lana Turner, and in 1942 she starred opposite Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca as Ilsa Lund, a woman torn between love and duty in wartime Morocco. Casablanca won the Academy Award for Best Picture and became one of the most quoted and revisited films ever made, fixing Bergman permanently in the public imagination ^[4][5].

Anyone asking who was Ingrid Bergman usually starts with the awards. She won her first Academy Award for Best Actress for Gaslight (1944), playing a wife whose husband methodically manipulates her toward madness. Further nominations followed for For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), and Joan of Arc (1948), a run of recognition that made her one of the most bankable and respected stars of the 1940s ^[1][5].

Her collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock produced some of her finest work. In Spellbound (1945) she played a psychoanalyst unraveling a colleague's amnesia, and in Notorious (1946) she gave what many critics regard as her greatest performance, as Alicia Huberman, the daughter of a convicted Nazi who agrees to spy for the United States in postwar Brazil. A third Hitchcock film, Under Capricorn (1949), was less successful commercially but completed a remarkable partnership ^[4][6].

A second Best Actress Oscar came for Anastasia (1956), in which she played an amnesiac woman groomed to impersonate the surviving daughter of Tsar Nicholas II. Her third Academy Award, for Best Supporting Actress, arrived for Murder on the Orient Express (1974), where she played a timid Swedish missionary in a brief but memorable turn. Only Katharine Hepburn, among actresses of that era, collected more Oscars ^[1][5]. Among other Ingrid Bergman achievements were a Tony Award for the Broadway production of Joan of Lorraine in 1947 and Emmy Awards for her television work, including a posthumous honor for playing Israeli prime minister Golda Meir in A Woman Called Golda (1982) ^[5][7].

Bergman married the Swedish dentist and later neurosurgeon Petter Lindström in 1937, and their daughter Pia was born in 1938. The marriage endured her move to Hollywood but grew strained as her career expanded and the couple spent long periods apart ^[2].

In 1949 she wrote an admiring letter to the Italian director Roberto Rossellini, whose neorealist films Rome, Open City and Paisan had impressed her, offering to work with him. He cast her in Stromboli (1950), shot on a volcanic island off Sicily. During production the two began an affair, and Bergman became pregnant with Rossellini's child while still married to Lindström. The news broke internationally and the reaction in the United States was ferocious ^[2][6].

The scandal reached the floor of the United States Senate, where Senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado denounced her in 1950 as an influence for evil, and religious and civic groups called for boycotts of her films. Bergman divorced Lindström, married Rossellini, and remained in Italy, effectively barred from American screens for several years. She and Rossellini had three children, a son, Roberto, and twin daughters, Isotta and Isabella Rossellini, who later became a noted actress and model. The marriage ended in 1957, and in 1958 Bergman married the Swedish theatrical producer Lars Schmidt, a union that lasted until their divorce in 1975 ^[1][2][6]. In 1972 Senator Charles Percy entered an apology into the Congressional Record for the attack made on her two decades earlier ^[2].

Bergman's American rehabilitation began with Anastasia, filmed in Europe for Twentieth Century-Fox, and her second Oscar signaled that Hollywood had forgiven what much of the press had once condemned. She accepted the award in absentia, with Cary Grant collecting it on her behalf ^[5][6].

Through the 1960s and 1970s she moved fluidly among film, theatre, and television, working in London, Paris, and New York. Stage credits included productions of Turgenev's A Month in the Country and O'Neill's More Stately Mansions, and she appeared in films such as Indiscreet (1958), opposite Cary Grant again, The Visit (1964), and Cactus Flower (1969) ^[3][7].

Her final feature film carried particular weight. In Autumn Sonata (1978), directed by her countryman Ingmar Bergman (no relation), she played a celebrated concert pianist confronting the daughter she had neglected, a raw performance that earned her a seventh Academy Award nomination. By then she was already fighting breast cancer, first diagnosed in 1974. She completed A Woman Called Golda for television while seriously ill, and she died in London on 29 August 1982, her sixty-seventh birthday. Her ashes were scattered in the sea off the Swedish coast ^[1][3][7].

Bergman's reputation has only strengthened since her death. The American Film Institute ranked her fourth among the greatest female stars of classic American cinema in 1999, behind Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Audrey Hepburn ^[8]. Casablanca and Notorious remain fixtures of critics' polls and repertory programming, and film schools still study her ability to convey thought on camera with minimal visible technique.

Among the most cited Ingrid Bergman facts is her range across languages: she performed in Swedish, German, English, Italian, and French over a career of nearly five decades, something few stars of any era have managed ^[1][3]. Her autobiography, Ingrid Bergman: My Story, written with Alan Burgess and published in 1980, gave a candid account of the Rossellini years and became a bestseller ^[7].

Her children have kept her memory active. Isabella Rossellini has spoken and written extensively about her mother, and the centenary of Bergman's birth in 2015 brought retrospectives, a documentary assembled from her own home movies (Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words), and her image on the official poster of the Cannes Film Festival ^[8]. The arc of her life, from orphaned Stockholm schoolgirl to condemned exile to honored elder of world cinema, remains one of the most compelling stories the film industry has produced.