(Originally written in May 18, 2001)
Ingrid Bergman: August 29, 1915 – August 29,1982
(How many people’s birthday and death day are on the same day?)
Bergman (1)
Ingrid’s father, Justus was one of eight children of his parents. By his nature, Justus was an artist (painting, music and photography). When he met Ingrid's future mother during her summer vacation to Sweden from Germany, he didn't have a stable life yet. To be able to marry her, he waited seven years and by then he opened up a photo studio to earn a good living.
When Ingrid was three, her Mon died of cancer. Ingrid was thirteen when her father died of stomach cancer (She herself died of breast cancer in 1982). The years before he died, Justus had a young lover called Greta who helped Ingrid a bit later by introducing her (Ingrid) into the film industry. Because of family's strong objection, Justus and Greta lived together without marriage until Justus died. Greta looked like a big sister to Ingrid.
I think Ingrid's background had set up a partcular tone for her later life.
When Ingrid was in her first year at Sweden Royal Drama School (actually she only spent one year there) she met her first husband Petter through friends. Petter was a dentist at the time. He was a handsome sports man too, about eleven years senior of Ingrid. He was a good dancer and liked wrestling. During World War II, he joined Ingrid in U.S.A. and persuaded his MD (Medical Doctor) there. He was very successful in his area and became a head of medical group of a hospital many years later. He was a very disciplined and intelligent man. He had one daughter Pia with Ingrid and other(s) with his second wife.
Before she made her first American movie Intermezzo in 1939, Ingrid had made about ten movies in her home country already. Her successful movies afterwards were Gaslight (her first Oscar, Best Actress), Casablanca and The Bells of St. Mary's etc. When her career and personal life wasn't the way she liked in late 1940s, she went to Italy to make a new wave in her career and new life with her new lover Roberto, who was a very famous Italian movie director and who became her second husband later.
Roberto had a totally different personality from Petter. If Petter was on one end of a personality spectrum, then Roberto must be on the other end. He led a typical artist life (somewhat like Ingrid’s father in his early years?). He didn't like to follow regular rules. He made both good movies and bad movies. When he died, the whole county mourned for him, even he was in debt more than millions of dollars. He had one son and two twin daughters with Ingrid. None of the movies made by Ingrid and Roberto together were very successful. When she was determined to go back to her career track, she and Roberto broke up.
Ingrid's second Oscar was from movie Anastasia, which was made after her break up with Roberto. (Her third Oscar, Best Supporting Actress, was from Murder of Orient Express. There were other Oscar-winning movies in which Ingrid played major roles, for instance, Casablanca).
Her third marriage was with Lars, who was a movie and play producer. Though their marriage was ended years later, Lars kept taking care of Ingrid's finance and health closely until she died.
Bergman (2)
When Ingrid first time came to America to begin her career in U.S.A., Mr. David Selznick (whose company just finished Gone with the Wind by then), who decided to introduce her to the American audience and later made her a super star, thought her physical figure didn’t quite fit a star’s. She was too tall (a girl of five feet eight inches in 1930s!); her name sounded a little weird so needed to be changed; her face, according to a makeup specialist working for Mr. Selznic, needed much work to be fixed.
But Ingrid rejected all the requests of change on her body, taking the risk of going back to Sweden. Here again, we can see the real beauty wasn’t her physical by itself, but her natural ability to DEFINE the beauty by associating it to her physical. She made the mass audience believe that her face was the beauty standard.
The same could apply to youth. At her twin daughters' 30th birthday in New York in 1982, Ingrid said the following to her daughters:
"Youth is not a time of life - it is a state of mind. So long as your heart receives messages of beauty, cheer, courage, grandeur, and power from the earth, from man, and from the Infinite, so long you are young. When the wires are all down and your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism, then you are old and may God have mercy on your soul".
Bergman (3)
Ingrid was a pleasant girl. She always tried to avoid unpleasant situations as much as she could. She would leave all the conflicts and tough issues to others, like her husband Petter, her publicists or her attorneys. She said there were only two kinds of people whom she would like: Those who could advance her career and those who could entertain her.
She must understand a character before she could accept the acting part in a movie or play. When she had trouble understanding a certain behavior of the character she was acting, she would ask the director like this: "Please give me a good reason why she would behave like that in this particular situation". Or "Either the character's reaction was wrong or the reason you gave me was wrong, because it was impossible she could do this in such a situation."
Petter often said that Ingrid wasn't smart, wasn't intelligent and she didn't think much when she was saying. Yes, Ingrid once told someone "People think before they say something. But I say first and then think afterwards, and that often brought me trouble." But probably it was her this trait that made her reactions looked so natural.
People knew that Ingrid could not live without working. To most people, she devoted herself to her work to an extreme level. Her last acting production was in the year when she died. I think she it was her work that brought her the most fun she wanted, especially those romances. She said to Petter more than once that she could not act right without falling in love with either her leading man or her director. A film making required a group of people, including her, her leading man and the director, to spend weeks or months together.
Her most wonderful romantic feelings just came from these film-making periods, during which she could spend much time with her leading men in her dressing room, in the excuse of practice for a love scene and having lunch or dinner with her admired directors. She wouldn't mind to have a fake crying (her fake crying looked more real than other's real crying on screen!) but she wanted real romance both on and off screen. (That was why she said she had a very rich life?) Sometime it could cause problem to her performance. For instance, in the movie For Whom the Bell Tolls, she was so delighted and excited with Gary Cooper (her leading man in the movie), that her tragic character in the story became a happy girl on the screen. But the original author Hamingway loved her anyway.
On the other hand, in the movie Joan of Arc, she wasn't in love with anyone, except the character Joan itself. This was the character Ingrid wanted to act since she ever heard of the story. The director Victor Fleming (the director of Gone With The Wind) was doing a big favor for Ingrid in making this movie because he loved Ingrid to death at the time and he knew how much Ingrid wanted to be Joan in a movie. But Ingrid didn't love Fleming at all and the movie just turned out to be unsuccessful.
I watched video tape of this movie afterward and found everything in the movie went wrong. (I also watched her Gaslight, Arch of Triumph and I intend to see more of her movies in the future). Even Ingrid herself didn’t look beautiful in the movie. Fleming died of heart attack after the movie was finished. Surely his heart was broken because Ingrid didn’t love him.
As in the case of Fleming, I think Petter did a similar mistake in his relationship with Ingrid. He might think if he did all those things for Ingrid, which he wouldn't enjoy doing so otherwise, his relationship with Ingrid would work out. But the outcome was the opposite.
It is like you trade physical things for love, either conscientiously or sub-conscientiously. If you don’t get what you expected at the end, you feel upset. You even feel betrayed thinking that you did your part while the other didn’t. Fleming maybe didn’t show much his upset on surface, but his body actually did for him (he died). Petter was very upset about Ingrid. He claimed that he loved Ingrid so much that he did all the sacrifices for her. Many of the details and facts about Ingrid he provided was obviously intended to damage Ingrid’s image and protect his own ego, though we should feel grateful to him for the facts that no one else would know otherwise and that helped us understand Ingrid more as a human being. Petter’s big war against Ingrid over their daughter Pia was another sad example.
Bergman (4)
At the time Ingrid was leaving her husband Petter for her lover Roberto in Italy, Roberto was leaving his wife Anna, a famous actress both in Italy and in the world. Though it was obviously so painful to Anna, she never openly said a single word to the media against either Roberto or Ingrid. She even said that she and Ingrid could become good friends. Certainly her love toward Roberto was a great one.
If two women really loves the same man, they should have no reason to hate each other but to be friendly, for they have the same purpose to serve and same goal to reach. They can even help each other to provide their love to the very same man. Does it sound logic enough to most of us? ;^)
I also read about Roberto's first wife (Anna wasn't his first), who kept taking good care of Roberto until his death. To me, these were great love stories indeed.
After Roberto met with Ingrid the first time in America during his visit to U.S.A. to accept a director award in 1949, he told a movie producer (who sponsored him for a possible contract with Roberto in the future) that he could put Ingrid into bed within just two weeks. I believe he probably claimed more than once that whenever he wanted a woman he was able to get her. Many years later, when he was making a film in India, a film producer’s young, well-educated beautiful wife fell in love for him. It was Ingrid who managed to talk India’s foreign minister into helping Roberto get away from his trouble and bring his film out of the country.
I believe there are people like Roberto who have the supper power and skill to conquer a woman in a flash of time. A quick example is the former U.S. president Bill Clinton, who must be one of them. American people still love Clinton, including me. I love Hilary Clinton too. I even wish she would run for president in the years to come and finally win her presidency. What does my ‘Love’ mean? Well, it simply means I care about them, am interested in them, think of them all the time, and wish them the best.
There was also a story about one of Ingrid 's fans, Tom(?), who went through a long way from a remote fan to a close friend of hers.
Tom had become Ingrid's fan ever since he was a school kid when he lived in New York City. Whenever he heard there was an Ingrid play showing in a nearby theatre, he would escape from his school and go there outside to only take a look at Ingrid when she was entering the theatre or going out of the theatre. One day Ingrid took a walk outside on street, Tom and another fan followed her. At one point of time, Ingrid stopped and asked them why they followed her. After she heard them saying it was because they loved her, she told them to not follow her anymore because she didn't like it.
Tom loved her anyway, no matter what happened. Even during the years when the whole world seamed against her, including a U.S. senator in Congress condemning her for her behavior after she left U.S. for Italy in 1949. One day Tom got a chance to talk with Ingrid when she allowed fans coming into the back stage to take pictures with her after one play finished the season. Since then Tom started writing to Ingrid and they became close friends. Scores of years later, when Ingrid died, Tom was one of her friends who showed up in her funeral in London.
Cary Grant had been a royal friend of Ingrid for a long time. It was him who accepted the Oscar award for Ingrid of her role in Anastasia when she had trouble coming to U.S.A. Cary was Ingrid's leading man in movies Indiscreet and Notorious. (My favorite movie of his is An Affair to Remember 1957 version and I found recently that he was born and grown up in Bristol, England, where we stayed three nights during our London trip in 2000.)
In Ingrid’s book “Ingrid Bergman, My Story” (by Ingrid Bergman and Alan Burgess in 1980), it was mentioned that there were many bad statements against Ingrid. I wanted to test my love toward her by checking those statements out, or different versions of her stories in other books. That was why I picked the biographical book “As Time Goes By - The Life of Ingrid Bergman”, which I believe is a very objective one with some hard facts or truths about Ingrid.
Of course, nothing has changed my feeling toward her, my most favorite female movie star.
References:
Ingrid Bergman My Story, by Ingrid Bergman and Alan Burgess in 1980
As Time Goes By - The Life Of Ingrid Bergman by Laurence Lemaer in 1986
