by Grace Carter
Ever since she arrived in the United States from Sweden in 1939, several Ingrid Bergmans have occupied the public imagination.
But which was the real one?
Was she the embodiment of luminous, pious devotion revered by filmgoers for such roles as the nun in The Bells of St. Mary’s and Saint Joan in Joan of Arc? Or was she the duplicitous, unrepentant harlot who abandoned her husband and child to have an affair with the Italian director Roberto Rossellini in 1950 – a scandal that led to her effective banishment from Hollywood for years?
Or was Bergman the enigmatic, misunderstood artist embraced by a forgiving public after her return to the United States in 1956 when she won an Academy Award for her performance in Anastasia?
As the actress herself put it, mystified by her own metamorphosis, “I’ve gone from saint to whore and back to saint again, all in one lifetime.”
The real Ingrid Bergman is, of course, far more complicated than any of these characterizations would suggest. Indeed, they contradict each other so sharply they couldn’t possibly all be true. And yet the clashing perceptions of Bergman shaped the trajectory of her life so powerfully that they provide a useful outline for the arc of her career: her rise as a radiant Hollywood star in the forties when she appeared in her most famous film, Casablanca; her fall in Europe in the fifties; and her triumphant third-act comeback that lasted for two-and-a-half decades until her death in 1982 from breast cancer at the age of sixty-seven.
Within that tumultuous narrative were several crucial relationships. She was married three times – at twenty-one to Swedish dentist Petter Lindström, whom she divorced at thirty-four to wed Rossellini; then, at forty-three, a year after ending her marriage to Rossellini, she married theatrical entrepreneur Lars Schmidt. Bergman divorced Schmidt in 1975, though he was by her side when she died. She had four children – one with Lindström and three with Rossellini, including Isabella Rossellini, who became a well-known model and film actress.
Bergman also had some notable affairs: with actor Gregory Peck while they co-starred in the 1945 Alfred Hitchcock film Spellbound; with celebrated Hungarian war photographer Robert Capa; and with The Wizard of Oz and Joan of Arc director Victor Fleming, among others. And yet as various men came and went and children were born and grew up, her work was the one constant in her life. It steadied her, kept her moving forward, and fulfilled her in a way that nothing else ever could.
“I have had my different husbands, my families,” she once said. “I am fond of them all, and I visit them all. But deep inside me, there is the feeling that I belong to show business.”
Though known primarily for her fifty big-screen films, the prolific Bergman also appeared in five television movies, two dozen radio dramas, and eleven stage productions, including challenging works by George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill, and Henrik Ibsen. She performed in five languages – English, French, German, Italian, and Swedish – a rarity for actors of any era. And in 1980, she published her memoir, Ingrid Bergman: My Story, to clear up some of the misperceptions about her life that she knew would haunt her children if she didn’t set the record straight.
Through it all, Bergman was the anti-diva. While many actors required chauffeured limousines, she drove herself around Hollywood in a small gray coupe. She usually wore little or no makeup in public. While some actors were mercurial, demanding and late to the movie set, Bergman was always punctual, professional, and fully prepared. It’s not uncommon for actors to renegotiate or renege on contracts the moment they become successful, but Bergman was known for honoring her agreements and keeping her word.
On screen, Bergman was unique not just for her beauty (cameramen loved her “bulletproof angles,” meaning she could be shot from any side.) She was also known for her intelligence and natural, unaffected acting style. The producer David O. Selznick, who discovered her, once called her “the most completely conscientious actress” he had ever worked with.
And more than most film stars of her day, Bergman was extremely versatile: She was able to fully inhabit a wide variety of characters and to excel in comedy, drama, and romance. “There is a kind of acting in the United States,” she once said, “especially in the movies, where the personality remains the same in every part. I like changing as much as possible.”
Wrote Murray Schumach in The New York Times: “Her beauty was so remarkable that it sometimes seemed to overshadow her considerable acting talent . . . the expressive blue eyes, wide, full-lipped 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.”
David Noh in Film Journal International said that Bergman “also brought a new emotional – almost Mediterranean – rawness to the screen with an intensity unseen before except in the more-stylized manner of Bette Davis.”
That beauty, talent, and passion would earn Bergman three Academy Awards, two Emmys, two Golden Globes, and a Tony. In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked her as the fourth-greatest female screen legend of classic American cinema behind only Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Audrey Hepburn.
Even towards the end of her life, as Bergman struggled with cancer for eight painful years, she performed at an astonishingly high level. During this period, she tackled two of her most demanding roles – a concert pianist in Autumn Sonata directed by Ingmar Bergman (no relation) and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in A Woman Called Golda, the last role of her life, for which she won a posthumous Emmy and Golden Globe.
And yet the key to the mystery of Ingrid Bergman lies less in her career accomplishments than her childhood: She lost her mother to a gallbladder condition at age two and her father to cancer when she was thirteen, leaving her an orphan in the care of various aunts and uncles.
That is where her story must begin, a tale the public has been fascinated by – and has debated vigorously – since Humphrey Bogart famously looked at her in Casablanca and said, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”
Ingrid Bergman was born on August 29, 1915, at Number 3 Strandvägen, a sixth-floor apartment in a building overlooking the harbor in Stockholm. Her parents, Justus Samuel Bergman and his German wife, Frieda Adler Bergman, named their only child for Sweden’s royal princess, then just two years old.
Though the rest of Europe was ensnared in World War I, the neutral Swedes carried on as usual. The Bergmans attended the nearby Royal Opera House and Royal Dramatic Theater. They drank wine and hot chocolate as they visited the art galleries and tea rooms along their busy street, which happened to be Stockholm’s grand boulevard.
With a long-standing tradition of free speech - guaranteed by the government since 1766 – Sweden has always encouraged and prized artistic expression and intellectual discourse stirred by luminaries such as playwright August Strindberg and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Selma Lagerlöf. But the country’s most popular art form, by far, was its thriving film industry.
By 1915, Sweden led Europe in filmmaking, and viewers became interested in creating their own home movies. Cinematographer Julius Jaenzon popularized the practice by taking films of his family at the beach and at home and releasing them to the public. This national pastime increased demand for cameras - still and motion - and inspired other artists, including Ingrid’s father, to pursue the new medium.
Justus Bergman was born in southern Sweden in May 1871, the thirteenth in an enormous family of fourteen children (seven boys and seven girls). He left home at fifteen, determined to be a painter, and met Anders Zorn, one of Sweden’s foremost artists, who agreed to give him free lessons. But by the age of eighteen, with no way to support himself, the penniless Justus abandoned Sweden for Chicago, where he found work decorating new hotels.
After ten ye
ars in Chicago, still longing to paint or pursue a singing career, Justus moved back to Sweden, where he set up an art gallery in Stockholm and took private singing and painting lessons.
That’s when he fell in love with a young woman named Friedel Adler, whom he had met when she was sixteen and vacationing with her parents in Sweden. The Adler family, who lived outside Hamburg, Germany, had stumbled across Justus as he was sketching in the park. Of her mother, Ingrid wrote: “Every day she used to walk through these woods, and in the woods, my father was painting. And during those daily meetings, they fell in love.”
Justus, who also spoke German, was mesmerized by Friedel - her dark eyes, expressive features, gentle nature, and her practicality. “Their worlds were so different,” Ingrid said. “My father was a bohemian, an artist, very easygoing, and my mother was the complete bourgeois.”
Later, after Ingrid became engaged herself for the first time, she decided to clean up some belongings she had stored away. In a box neatly tied up, she found letters her mother had written to her father before they were married.
“I took that box of letters to bed with me that night and read them until the early hours,” Ingrid said. “It was the first time I had got to know my mother as a woman in love with my father, and I cried and cried as I read about all the difficulties they had. Her family didn’t think he was good enough for their daughter.”
Despite the odds against them, Justus secretly proposed to Friedel and gave her an engagement ring that she wore on a string around her neck in the daytime and only placed on her finger when she went to bed. One night, her mother came into her room, saw her fast asleep wearing the ring, and woke her up, demanding an explanation. “I want to marry this man and no one else even if I have to wait all my life,” Friedel said. “And I’m never going to marry anybody else, never!”
But if they were ever to marry, Justus needed a job. So he spent the next six years trying to become a more respectable man. Though his Stockholm art gallery failed in 1903, he received an offer from his cousin, voice teacher Karl Nygren, to lead a choir as it toured North America performing for Swedish-American communities in Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
When the tour ended in 1906, Justus, once again unemployed, alternated living in a crowded flat with his brother Otto’s family and with his unmarried sister Ellen, who suffered from a congenital heart defect.
Finally, Justus got a steady job for a company that manufactured appliances, and in 1907, he traveled to Germany to visit with Friedel and her family. At long last – the courtship had lasted seven years – the Adlers were satisfied that he could make an acceptable living and agreed to bless the marriage.
After their wedding in 1907, Justus took a job selling art and photography supplies in Stockholm. “He was doing quite well,” recalled Ingrid. “He did film developing. They did hand-painted photographs in those days; and he sold frames and cameras. And he still painted portraits . . .”
Justus was also a talented singer and piano player who could entertain his audiences with ballads in both Swedish and German. Friedel often acted as his model, posing for a variety of paintings, and occasionally sang along with him as he regaled his listeners.
Before Ingrid was born in 1915, the couple had lost two children - the first, born in 1908, was stillborn; their second, in 1912, lived only a week. The practical Friedel did not allow herself to indulge in grief and immediately returned to her domestic duties: keeping a clean, neat home, managing household finances, and cooking, a skill at which she excelled.
By the time Ingrid was born, Justus Bergman was in business for himself selling cameras - the most popular novelty in Stockholm - in his own shop on the waterfront. Like his customers, he enjoyed bringing home the latest model and filming his life with his wife, daughter, and siblings, and the picturesque scenes along the harbor in Stockholm.
Before long, Justus was hired as the managing director for Konstindustri, a company that manufactured equipment to sell to artists, photographers, and recording companies. With his income drastically increased, the Bergmans lived comfortably and could afford to indulge in luxuries like opera tickets and new camera equipment.
As an adult, Ingrid would cherish her father’s photographs and family films. In all the home movies, Ingrid was the star, dressed in charming costumes as she performed for her father and his camera. On her first birthday, Ingrid smiles and waves; when she was two, photos captured her standing with her mother on the steps of the nearby Royal Dramatic Theater. “Papa was mad about moving pictures as well as stills,” Ingrid said later. “Who knows? If he’d lived, he might have gone into Swedish movies.”
Then tragedy struck, and Ingrid’s idyllic life would never be the same. The first week of 1918, her mother grew ill. At first, her family believed Friedel had over-indulged again – albeit more than usual – which happened often when she prepared a hearty, rich German meal for her family. Food was one of Friedel’s few indulgences, as her growing waistline made clear. She occasionally suffered an upset stomach, which she believed to be indigestion that was easily treated by temporarily cutting back on the richer fare.
But soon it became clear that this was no mere upset stomach. This time, fever and vomiting left her bedridden for days. By January 12, Friedel was in such anguish that Justus sent Ingrid to stay with his brother Otto’s family so his daughter would be spared seeing her mother in such a wretched condition.
As the hours passed, Friedel’s symptoms worsened: She became jaundiced, had severe abdominal pain, and was throwing up violently. A doctor, diagnosing her condition as gallbladder disease, advised that she be taken to a clinic immediately. But as the arrangements were being made, Frieda fell into a coma. The following day, her breathing was slow and irregular, and the next day, Friday, January 19, at about 10:00 p.m., Friedel Bergman died. She was thirty-four years old. Ingrid was just two-and-a-half.
“I don’t remember my mother at all,” said Ingrid later. “My father filmed me sitting on her lap when I was one, and then again when I was two, and at three, he photographed me putting flowers on her grave.”
Growing up without a mother brought Ingrid extremely close to her father. Now she was the only star of his family films - playing a tiny violin at the age of three or mugging for the camera in her grandmother’s hat and glasses at four. Her father took candid photos everywhere they went - feeding the birds at Berzelius Park or bundled up against the cold in her little wool hat - and encouraged Ingrid to play dress-up and make up stories to act out.
Needing a woman in the house, Justus invited his sister Ellen to live with them soon after Friedel died. At forty-nine, Ellen was no stranger to tending to others. The only girl in their huge family who had not married, she had been kept at home by her parents to take care of them in their old age. When they died, she had moved among her brothers and sisters to help with whatever problems they were having; she had also volunteered for charities for her Lutheran church.
When Friedel died, Ellen curtailed her church activities to take on her new assignment, moving in with Justus and Ingrid to help with the cooking, cleaning, and sewing. “It was Aunt Ellen who replaced my mother,” Ingrid said later. “I was three years old and really loved her, and I called her Mama. She was always a bit upset about this, especially in the shops where they knew her as Miss Bergman.”
From an early age, Ingrid loved make-believe. “I was always being something else: a bird, or a lamppost, a policeman, a postman, a flowerpot,” she recalled. One day, she pretended to be a small dog and became upset when her father refused to put a leash around her neck and take her for a walk. Undeterred, she still trotted at his heels, barking at passersby and lifting her leg at every tree they passed. “I don’t think he was really very happy about this performance,” she recalled. “But, of course, it all came out of being a lonely child.”
Most often, her father encouraged her theatrical impulses. But her Aunt Ellen vehemently disapproved: She was, after all, a devout Lutheran wh
o thought acting was for sinners. “That’s the devil sitting on your back,” Aunt Ellen would say. Ingrid was not fazed. “The devil isn’t sitting on my back,” she said. “I’ve looked, and I can’t see any devil.”
Life wasn’t always so free-wheeling, though. From the time she was three until she turned eighteen, Ingrid spent summers with her mother’s family in Germany, where her daily routines differed dramatically from the happy days spent with her lenient and fun-loving father. The Adlers were strict disciplinarians who demanded obedience and conformity.
One night, for instance, Ingrid’s grandmother woke her up because she had thrown a dress over a chair. She made her fold up her dress and underwear and place them neatly on the chair. She also pointed disapprovingly at her shoes. “But I have put them by my chair, Grandmama, and they are tidy,” Ingrid said. “Yes, my child,” her grandmother replied, “but they’re not neat. They should lie close together with both toes level and pointing the same way.”
Such moments stayed with Ingrid throughout her life, making her obsessed with orderliness. “I can’t live in a house where there is disorder,” she said in her memoir. “I become absolutely ill.”
Though she felt awkward and out of place at her grandparents’ house, Ingrid richly enjoyed the days she spent with her mother’s sister Elsa, whom she called Aunt Mutti – Mutti being German for mom.
Aunt Mutti was married to a wealthy Frenchman who had invested in the coffee trade in the Caribbean and was rarely around. She lived luxuriously in a walled estate outside of Hamburg with lots of servants. Aunt Mutti became as much a surrogate mother to young Ingrid as her Aunt Ellen, teaching her German and encouraging her to memorize German poetry and sing German songs so she could entertain her father when he returned to Sweden at summer’s end.
“I loved staying with my young and pretty Aunt Mutti,” Ingrid recalled, noting that her sons had been taken to Haiti with their father and died there of a tropical disease, putting a tremendous strain on the marriage. “She always wanted a little daughter,” Ingrid said. “As her sister’s only child, she made such a fuss over me.”
