<Archive Obituaries> Ingrid Bergman (August 29th 1982)
Bill Schenley
Photo:
http://www.casalinx.com/fotoacteurs/Ingrid_Bergman1_jpg.jpg
FROM: The New York Times (August 31st 1982) ~
By Murray Schumach
Ingrid Bergman, the three-time Academy Award-winning actress who
exemplified wholesome beauty and nobility to countless moviegoers,
died of cancer Sunday at her home in London on her 67th birthday.
Miss Bergman had been ill for eight years. Despite this, she played
two of her most demanding roles in this period, a concert pianist in
Ingmar Bergman's ''Autumn Sonata'' and Golda Meir, the Israeli Prime
Minister in ''A Woman Called Golda.'' her last role.
Miss Bergman said in an interview earlier this year that she was
determined not to let her illness prevent her from enjoying the
remainder of her life.
''Cancer victims who don't accept their fate, who don't learn to live
with it, will only destroy what little time they have left,'' she
said. Miss Bergman added that she had to push herself to play the role
of Golda Meir: ''I honestly didn't think I had it in me. But it has
been a wonderful experience, as an actress and as a human being who is
getting more out of life than expected.''
Lars Schmidt, a Swedish producer from whom Miss Bergman was divorced
in 1975, was with her at the time of her death. Incandescent, the
critics called Ingrid Bergman. Or radiant. Or luminous. They said her
performances were sincere, natural. Sometimes a single adjective was
not enough. One enraptured writer saw her as ''a breeze whipping over
a Scandinavian peak.'' Kenneth Tynan needed an essay before he
distilled her quality down to a sort of electric transmission of ''I
need you'' that registered instantly upon yearning audiences.
At the heart of the Swedish star's monumental box-office magnetism was
the kind of rare beauty that Hollywood cameramen call ''bulletproof
angles,'' meaning it can be shot from any angle.
Her beauty was so remarkable that it sometimes seemed to overshadow
her considerable acting talent. The expressive blue eyes, wide,
fulllipped mouth, high cheekbones, soft chin and broad forehead
projected a quality that combined vulnerability and courage;
sensitivity and earthiness, and an unending flow of compassion.
It all seemed so natural that not until she was well into middle age,
in Ingmar Bergman's taxing ''Autumn Sonata'' in 1978, did many of her
fans fully realize the talent, work and intelligence that were behind
the performances that won her three Academy Awards.
She was honored as best actress for her roles in ''Gaslight'' in 1944
and ''Anastasia'' in 1956, and as best supporting actress in ''Murder
on the Orient Express'' in 1974.
Different in Temperament
In temperament, Miss Bergman was different from most Hollywood
superstars. She did not indulge in tantrums or engage in harangues
with directors. If she had a question about a script, she asked it
without fuss. She could be counted on to be letter perfect in her
lines before she faced the camera. And during the intervals between
scenes, her relaxing smile and hearty laugh were as unaffected as her
low-heeled shoes, long walking stride and minimal makeup.
Yet this even-tempered and successful actress, who was apparently
happily married, became involved in a scandal that rocked the movie
industry, forced her to stay out of the United States for seven years
and made her life as tempestuous as many of her roles. In a sense, she
became a barometer of changing moral values in the United States.
In 1949 she fell in love with Roberto Rossellini, the Italian film
director, and had a child by him before she could obtain a divorce
from her husband, Dr. Peter Lindstrom, and marry the director.
Symbol of Moral Perfection
Before the scandal, millions of Americans had been moved by her
performances in such box-office successes as ''Intermezzo,'' ''For
Whom the Bell Tolls,'' ''Gaslight,'' ''Spellbound,'' ''The Bells of
St. Mary's,'' ''Notorious'' and ''Casablanca,'' roles that had made
her, somewhat to her annoyance, a symbol of moral perfection.
''I cannot understand,'' she said, long before the scandal, ''why
people think I'm pure and full of nobleness. Every human being has
shades of bad and good.''
Suddenly, in 1949, the American public that had elevated her to the
point of idolatry cast her down, vilified her and boycotted her films.
She was even condemned on the floor of the United States Senate.
Then, seven years after she had fallen from grace in this country, she
returned to gather new acclaim and honors for her acting, and she
never again suffered any noticeable loss of favor as an actress or as
a person. But she spent nearly all of her remaining working life in
Europe, sometimes for American movie companies.
So complete was Miss Bergman's victory that Senator Charles H. Percy,
Republican of Illinois, entered into the Congressional Record, in
1972, an apology for the attack made on her 22 years earlier in the
Senate by Edwin C. Johnson, Democrat of Colorado.
'Had a Wonderful Life'
By this time Miss Bergman had already expressed publicly her feelings
and philosophy. Upon her return to the United States in 1956, for the
first time since her departure, she told a jammed airport press
conference, in English, Swedish, German, French and Italian:
''I have had a wonderful life. I have never regretted what I did. I
regret things I didn't do. All my life I've done things at a moment's
notice. Those are the things I remember. I was given courage, a sense
of adventure and a little bit of humor. I don't think anyone has the
right to intrude in your life, but they do. I would like people to
separate the actress and the woman.''
Though her marriage to Mr. Rossellini fell apart less than two years
later - she won custody of their three children - Robertino, Isabella
and Ingrid - she never changed her attitude. And Miss Bergman
continued to defend the films she made for him, though all were
financial failures and received poor reviews in this country. The
Rossellini debacles created a myth that before she worked for him she
had only successes. Among her pre-Rossellini failures were ''Arch of
Triumph,'' ''Joan of Arc'' and ''Under Capricorn,'' all of which came
immediately before she went to work for Mr. Rossellini.
Desire for Artistic Growth
It was Miss Bergman's lifelong desire for artistic growth that drew
her to Mr. Rossellini. She had been deeply moved by his films ''Open
City'' and ''Paisan,'' which established him as a major force in
neorealism. Money had never been enough for Miss Bergman. ''You don't
act for money,'' she said. ''You do it because you love it, because
you must.''
Even the Oscars she had won were not enough. On Broadway, her
portrayal of Joan of Arc, in Maxwell Anderson's ''Joan of Lorraine,''
won her an Antoinette Perry award, the highest honor in the American
theater. Audiences and critics could adore her love scenes with
Humphrey Bogart in ''Casablanca'' and with Cary Grant in
''Notorious.'' But praise, too, was not enough.
''There is a kind of acting in the United States,'' she said many
years later, ''especially in the movies, where the personality remains
the same in every part. I like changing as much as possible.''
Sought Out Rossellini
This artistic need prompted her to write to Mr. Rossellini: ''I would
make any sacrifice to appear in a film under your direction.'' He
leaped at the opportunity, rewrote a script he had intended for Anna
Magnani, and went with Miss Bergman to the Italian island of Stromboli
to make the film of that name.
While this movie was being made, she asked her husband for a divorce
so she could marry Mr. Rossellini. He tried to block it, even after
learning she was pregnant with the director's child.
The first of her three children with the director was born, under a
media siege, in Italy, seven days before she was remarried. Dr.
Lindstrom, a neurosurgeon, won custody of their daughter, Pia, who
subsequently became a well-known television reporter.
By 1957, she and Mr. Rossellini were separated, but before that Miss
Bergman had begun a new phase in her career. She made ''Anastasia''
for 20th Century-Fox and won her second Oscar in 1956, playing the
mysterious woman who might or might not be the surviving daughter of
Czar Nicholas II. She then won a television Emmy award for her
performance of the tormented governess in a dramatization of Henry
James's ''The Turn of the Screw.'' In 1958 she married Lars Schmidt, a
successful Swedish theatrical producer.
Enjoyed All 3 Media
Miss Bergman refused to be drawn into arguments about acting in
movies, the theater and television. She enjoyed all three. In the
movies, she said, one acted for one eye, the camera. In the theater,
for a thousand eyes, the theater audience. Television was
''wonderful,'' she said, allowing for the frenzied schedule.
Maturity strengthened her determination to be more selective in roles.
This was one of the main reasons she returned to Broadway in 1967,
after a 21-year absence, in the role of a mother disliked by her son
in Eugene O'Neill's ''More Stately Mansions.''
She had met the playwright in her Hollywood years, when, during a
vacation from films, she played the prostitute in his ''Anna
Christie'' in theaters in New Jersey and on the West Coast. During
another sabbatical from Hollywood, in 1940, she had made her Broadway
stage debut as Julie in ''Liliom,'' opposite Burgess Meredith.
Miss Bergman's next growth period, which included stage performances
of works by George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen and the role of the
vengeful millionaire in the film version of ''The Visit,'' was
climaxed by the fulfillment of a 13-year effort to persuade Ingmar
Bergman, the director, to let her work for him.
In his ''Autumn Sonata,'' she gave what she considered her finest
performance, as a middle-aged concert pianist who, during a brief
visit to her married daughter, played by Liv Ullmann, engages in
prolonged and tearful confrontations that reveal a complex and searing
love-hate relationship. She was nominated for her fourth Oscar for
this 1978 movie, and she said it might be her last role.
''I don't want to go down and play little parts,'' she said. ''This
should be the end.'' Miss Bergman always refused to play any part that
required her to be nude or seminude. Although she was opposed to movie
censorship, she considered nudity, particularly in love scenes, ugly,
saying: ''Since the beginning of time, good theater has existed
without nudity. Why change now?''
Born in Stockholm
Miss Bergman was born in Stockholm on Aug. 29, 1915. Her mother, who
was from Hamburg, Germany, died when Ingrid was three years old. As an
only child, she learned to create imaginary friends. Her father, who
had a camera shop, adored her and photographed her constantly, often
in costume. He died when she was 13. She lived briefly with an
unmarried aunt and then with an uncle and aunt who had five children.
At 17, although she was tall and somewhat ungainly - she was 5 feet 9
inches and weighed about 135 pounds - she auditioned successfully for
the government-sponsored Royal Dramatic School.
Within seven years she was one of the leading movie stars in Sweden
and had refused several offers from Hollywood. Finally, in 1939, at
the age of 24, Miss Bergman agreed to do a film for David O. Selznick.
It was ''Intermezzo,'' with Leslie Howard. She returned to Sweden to
her husband, who was then a dentist, and their daughter, Pia.
The film was so successful that Mr. Selznick, convinced he had found
''another Garbo,'' persuaded her to return to Hollywood. Looking back
on her career many years later, particularly on her feeling of
youthful shyness and awkwardness, the actress said: ''I can do
everything with ease on the stage, whereas in real life I feel too big
and clumsy. So I didn't choose acting. It chose me.'' Miss Bergman is
survived by her four children, who were reported to be flying to
London yesterday for the funeral. The funeral will be ''a very quiet,
family affair,'' said Alfred Jackman, funeral director at Harrods, the
London department store that is handling the arrangements. Mr. Jackman
added, ''After cremation, her ashes may be taken back to Sweden.''
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Here's Looking At You Kid;
Ingrid Bergman: An Appreciation
FROM: The Washington Post (August 31st 1982) ~
By Christine Williams
She had been an awkward kid, she said, abnormally tall and afflicted
with a "clumsy shyness." Her father ran a camera shop in Stockholm,
and he died when she was 12. That same year, in the gymnasium of a
Swedish school, she was waiting with the other girls for a class to
begin. The gymnasium had a stage, and on impulse she went up and,
saying she would entertain her friends (the gym class having been
canceled), performed a one-person play of her own devising, taking all
the parts.
When Ingrid Bergman died Sunday night on her 67th birthday she had
taken nearly all the parts there were to take.
On screen, in her youth, she often portrayed beautiful victims. The
sad or complicated destinies she played out seemed all the more
powerful in contrast to her distinguishing, clean-scrubbed air of
insouciance. Here was a noble eagerness, a tall, cool vivacity, that
went beyond sex appeal or beauty. You could see what she brought out
in male colleagues with styles as disparate as Bogart, Cooper, Grant
and Peck. She was not only interesting, but interested.
We will remember her as at once ethereal and robust, clearheaded yet
capable of inestimable passion, and possessed of lips that, when they
trembled, set whole theaters to thoughts of rescue or solace.
Between 1941 and 1946 she made "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,"
"Casablanca," "For Whom the Bell Tolls," "Gaslight," "The Bells of St.
Mary's," "Spellbound," "Saratoga Trunk" and "Notorious." There were 50
movies in all, capped last year with a remarkably convincing
television portrait of Golda Meir.
In the single year 1943, she starred in two movies that defy rational
discussion.
Ernest Hemingway was not very good writing about women, or so it seems
now, and in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" his Maria seemed an impossible
novelistic invention, a little "rabbit" untranslatable to any other
medium.
Then suddenly the young Bergman appeared among the shell-shocked
Spanish Loyalists, hair shorn, to creep into the sleeping bag of Gary
Cooper in the snow while her Roberto, who knew he would die, tried to
pretend otherwise and explain it all -- war, love and demolition -- to
her.
Hemingway ought to have thanked her. The fashion world did. That film,
which still causes strong men to weep and through which Bergman's
youthful radiance and embattled hope shines as perhaps in no other,
created a hair-styling trend known as the "feather cut," of which
Bergman said, with what came to be a characteristic honesty:
"Yes, it started a new fashion. But what the poor women didn't realize
was that I had a hairdresser on the set who combed me every 10
minutes, and I wore pincurls between takes to keep it just right."
In "Casablanca," that same year, Bergman played Ilsa Lund to Humphrey
Bogart's Rick Blaine, in what is probably the best-loved B movie ever
made. This time Bergman was not bringing to life a novelist's
invention. There was no novel, and in fact no completed screenplay --
the script by Julius and Philip Epstein changed every day. At one
point Bergman asked the writers whom she was supposed to be in love
with -- Monsieur Rick, rakish owner of the Cafe Americain, or her
idealist husband, Victor Lazlo (Paul Henreid). The writers told her to
play it in between -- they hadn't figured out the answer themselves.
Two endings were prepared -- the second of which had her going off
with Rick, thereby leaving Lazlo and Capt. Renault (Claude Rains) to
start the beginning of a beautiful friendship. But only the first was
filmed, in which she and Rick parted, as duty triumphed over the
heart.
Rick: You'd better hurry or you'll miss that plane.
Ilsa: Goodbye, Rick . . . God bless you.
It is said that the old stories don't work anymore, that we must come
up with something new. But now, when the new is a singer with colored
lights in her mouth or gay-straight threesomes dramatized from Beverly
Hills or road warriors in love with gasoline, otherwise sensible
people are going to see "Casablanca" for the 17th time.
Devotion to "Casablanca" has been, and will continue to be,
irrational.
Bergman was herself rational. She had what was sometimes described as
a "Nordic stubbornness," but although she knew what was right for her
career she did not always do it.
In 1948, when she was the most popular actress in the world, she wrote
an impulsive letter to Roberto Rossellini, then the foremost director
in the world. They made the movie "Stromboli" together, in which she
played a war refugee trying to escape from an imprisoning marriage on
a volcanic island.
She was still married to Dr. Petter Lindstrom, with whom she had a
daughter, Pia, when she revealed that she was about to have
Rossellini's child. A scandal of extraordinary proportions resulted.
Bergman eventually married Rossellini and withdrew to Europe, her
American career in tatters.
The word "brazen" was frequently affixed to her behavior. A columnist
of the day, George Sokolsky, compared her conduct to that of the
Soviet Union, which he said had already discovered "that the
destruction of the family system leads to social and intellectual
decay." She was denounced in Congress as "a powerful influence for
immorality."
By the mid-'50s, Rossellini and Bergman had separated, and she
subsequently married a third time.
The exile was over, and America welcomed her back. "Anastasia," a
story that delved into the unknown fate of the czar's daughter said to
have been executed during the Russian Revolution, was a big hit and
won her an Oscar in mid-career. Her first had been at the height of
her fame, for "Gaslight" in 1944; and her third would come for a
character role in "Murder on the Orient Express" in 1974.
To most of the country she is remembered simultaneously as a handsome
older woman, a voluptuous barmaid ("Dr. Jekyll") and a
baseball-playing nun ("The Bells of St. Mary's"). It is very
disconcerting, but that is the magical other-dimension of movie lives
-- they grow old, as we do, but also go on as before, as memory does.
Bergman found this as confusing as the rest of us.
She wrote in her autobiography that when her old movies turned up on
TV, "I run right at the television and stare at it . . . I look at
that person as if it's somebody for whom I'm responsible; it could be
my mother, it could be my child. You know, somebody that you say, 'Oh
my God, I hope they make it.' "
It is difficult to let go. Perhaps we don't have to.
There will still be, in midnights to come, Stanley Donen's
"Indiscreet," in which she paired with Cary Grant; and her unusual
films for Alfred Hitchcock, "Spellbound" and "Notorious."
A single image from "Spellbound": She is the worried psychiatrist
coping with Gregory Peck (colleague? fraud? murderer?); they walk in a
meadow, her coat is slung over her arm, he looks into her eyes . . .
Suddenly it is not important whether he is a murderer, an amnesiac . .
In "Notorious," set in Rio de Janeiro, she was opposite Cary Grant,
playing a secret service man tracking Nazis. But although she is in
love with Grant she has to marry Claude Rains, who tries to poison
her. The image is of Grant carrying her--her head lolls, the poison
has done its work--out, away, full of mixed feelings, toward some
indeterminate complicated safekeeping . . .
Miss Bergman, when people ran on like this to her, often nodded
enthusiastically, it is said. She liked watching movies too.
Wherever she went in the last decades, she was asked again and again
about "Casablanca," and she always tried to answer the questions,
clear up the stories (Bogart was in a bad mood throughout, convinced
that nobody had any idea where the picture was going and that it
couldn't possibly be any good), and be a good sport.
She said she quite enjoyed Woody Allen's comedy, "Play It Again, Sam,"
in which Allen is accompanied through various amorous episodes by a
ghost of Bogie. Miss Bergman then went to see the movie again, curious
as to whether anyone had actually said "Play it again, Sam."
"The closest is when I say, 'Play it, Sam,' " she reported.
Could she act? That is an absurd question the answer to which is yes.
Yes, but acting was only part of it. The other part, the part which
sticks, must've been there all along. It must've been there on the gym
stage when she was 12, and it was there in her last production -- as
Golda Meir on television.
As one former resident of Israel marveled yesterday:
"It was almost eerie how Bergman got Golda down . . . the constant
flicking of her cigarette, that characteristic voice like an old
man's, even the face, yes, even the face was Golda's."
On the screen, Bergman said a lot of goodbyes: as Ilsa, as Maria and
the rest.
It was better when it was only a movie. The Films of Ingrid Bergman
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Ingrid Bergman in art:
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Here is a list of films made by actress Ingrid Bergman:
"Munkbrogreven," 1934.
"Branningar," 1935.
"Swedenhielms," 1935.
"Pa Solsidan," 1936.
"Intermezzo," (in Swedish) 1937.
"Juninatten," 1937.
"Dollar," 1938.
"Die Ver Gesselen," 1938.
"En Kvinnas Ansikte," 1939.
"Intermezzo," (remake in English) 1939.
"Rage in Heaven," 1941.
"Adam Had Four Sons," 1941.
"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," 1941.
"En Enda Natt," 1942.
"Casablanca," 1943.
"For Whom the Bell Tolls," 1943.
"Gaslight," 1944.
"The Bells of St. Mary's," 1945.
"Spellbound," 1945.
"Saratoga Trunk," 1945.
"Notorious," 1946.
"Arch of Triumph," 1948.
"Joan of Arc," 1948.
"Under Capricorn," 1949.
"The Surf," 1949.
"Stromboli," 1950.
"Europa," 1951.
"We the Women," 1953.
"Journey to Italy," 1954.
"Joan at the Stake," 1954.
"Fear," 1954.
"The Greatest Love," 1954.
"Anastasia," 1956.
"Elena et les Hommes," 1956.
"Paris Does Strange Things," 1957.
"Indiscreet," 1958.
"The Inn of the Sixth Happiness," 1958.
"Goodbye Again," 1961.
"The Visit," 1964.
"The Yellow Rolls-Royce," 1965.
"Fugitive in Vienna," 1967.
"Stimulantia," 1967.
"Cactus Flower," 1969.
"A Walk in the Spring Rain," 1970.
"From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,"1974.
"Murder on the Orient Express," 1974.
"A Matter of Time," 1976.
"Autumn Sonata," 1979. Ingrid Bergman's television credits include:
"Turn of the Screw," 1960.
"A Woman Called Golda," 1982.
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