Ingrid Bergman

by Grace Carter

  More than one crew member was in tears by the time Ingrid completed the scene. She simply asked for some water and a cigarette and then went off to lie down.

  When the tabloids reported she had one foot in the grave, Ingrid laughed and said, yes, but it was too damp and chilly in there, so she went to work in Israel where it’s warm and dry. When Oriana Fallaci, a journalist she’d known for many years, came to visit her and lamented her condition, Ingrid told her she had no regrets. She’d lived a beautiful, fascinating, fortunate life. She was not bitter.

  The evening before their last day of production, Ingrid hosted a dinner party for the cast and crew. When everyone had finished eating, she raised her wine glass and stood up and thanked everyone, with personal messages for Corman, Gibson, her makeup director, wardrobe designer, and hairdresser. She even sent Corman’s son, a law student who had a crush on her while growing up, a picture from Casablanca with the words, “Thank you for the monumental crush, and here’s looking at you, kid!” To Johnstone, she presented a small, silver bulldog for being her “watchdog and protector.”

  The last day of filming did not go smoothly. There were camera problems, lighting problems, and missing props. Ingrid joked that the camera was stalling because it didn’t want to say goodbye any more than she did. Perspiring and nauseated from her medication, Ingrid filmed the last scene of her forty-eight-year career. At a farewell dinner Corman had arranged for the company that night, Ingrid made her rounds to thank everyone, and then slipped away with Johnstone.

  When she got home, she let the tears fall. She told a friend that the quietness of her apartment suddenly seemed foreboding, like a sentencing, and she felt as if a loved one had died. She cried as she looked out the window and over the river. After so many movies and plays, these goodbyes should be easier by now, she thought. But they weren’t. Never again would she stand in front of the camera, her devoted friend.

  Nearing Christmas, at a press conference to promote A Woman Called Golda, Ingrid took the opportunity to say goodbye. She would not be performing in any more movies or plays, she said. Instead, she planned to travel the world and play with her grandchildren. That is precisely how she spent the Christmas holiday of 1981 – at Choisel with Schmidt and her family.

  In January, Ingrid went back to London, and at Schmidt’s insistence, Johnstone moved into her Chelsea home. Though growing weaker by the day, Ingrid ate out with friends, went to movies and plays, and walked in the park by the Thames.

  Unable to use her right arm, she wrote letters to friends using her left. She told Griff James she felt so awful it was difficult to keep her spirits up, though she did manage to joke that maybe after playing Golda Meir, they’d consider her to play Margaret Thatcher, the former British Prime Minister.

  She frequently asked James and Johnstone to reserve theater tickets and would venture out to shows with one of them or with Todd, who said that although Ingrid felt wretched, she rarely complained. Todd remembered only one melancholic moment when Ingrid said she wondered sometimes whether it would be better to be gone than to carry on as she was. She felt like she had nothing left to offer the world.

  There was still laughter, however. Once, Ingrid and Todd showed up at the theater to find the lobby filled with reporters and photographers. Assuming they were there to harass her, Ingrid asked the manager how they knew she would be there. He told her they didn’t - they were there to see Princess Margaret. Ingrid and Todd laughed quietly about it throughout the entire play.

  Ingrid didn’t talk much to her family about death. She saved those conversations for Todd, Johnstone, and James and spoke without self-pity or dramatics. She sometimes referred to “the great theater in the sky” and said she was curious to see what it was like. She also started thinking more about her parents and kept their pictures by her bed. Isabella noticed that the photographs had lip marks on them from her mother’s kisses.

  She made a few changes to her will, making sure there were provisions for Britt and Britt’s daughter Agneta. She also left bequests to James, Johnstone, Kay Brown’s daughter Kate - her goddaughter - and to Rossellini’s niece, Fiorella Mariani, and her maid in Rome. The bulk of her nearly $4 million estate was divided evenly among her four children.

  A Woman Called Golda was broadcast in the United States in April 1982 and received rave reviews. The New York Times said, “Miss Bergman creates a woman of unwavering strength and sudden spurts of totally captivating warmth. A superb actress has taken full advantage of a splendid opportunity.” Another critic said it was a perfect final jewel in her crown.

  In June, Ingrid summoned all her strength to put together one last party - this one to celebrate her twins’ thirtieth birthday. No one could talk her out of traveling to New York for the occasion, although her daughters could see the pain and fear in her eyes.

  While in New York, Ingrid spent time with Kay Brown, her ex-flame Robert Anderson, and other friends. Anderson remembered how weak Ingrid seemed and how she perspired during lunch one day in the Plaza. Though very ill, she insisted on keeping a hair appointment she had made at nearby Bergdorf’s. He was surprised when the receptionist at the salon didn’t recognize Ingrid and asked for her name.

  In early July, Ingrid and Johnstone traveled back home to London, where her friend and co-star from Captain Brassbound, Joss Ackland, brought her books and tapes to enjoy. One was the classic novella The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

  Ingrid spent as much time as she could outdoors and sometimes in her sitting room, avoiding her bed. She sifted through old photos and scrapbooks, relishing her memories. There were the pictures of her as a young girl, so shy except when she was pretending. There were pictures of her parents, Aunt Ellen, Uncle Otto, and Aunt Mutti.

  Ingrid had kept her favorite pictures of Lindstrom and enjoyed the many photos of little Pia, of whom she was so proud. There were scores of snapshots from Italy as well, of her with Rossellini on Stromboli or with Robertino, Isabella, and Ingrid. They had grown to be strong and independent adults, each one a unique and fascinating person. Despite its hardship, her time in Italy had brought her so much beauty and love. She never regretted it for a moment.

  The many photos of Schmidt - taken at banquets, at Choisel, and on Danholmen - brought a rush of sentiment as well. She’d been shown so much love from family and her many friends. Photos of her dear friend Hitch and men she had loved - Edvin Adolphson, Bob Capa, Larry Adler, Victor Fleming, and Robert Anderson - brought back warm memories.

  The treasure trove of images from her acting career was dazzling. The camera had captured so many of her personas: Elsa in The Count of Monk’s Bridge; Anita in Intermezzo; and the damaged and embittered Anna in A Woman’s Face. She reminisced about characters she held especially dear: the saucy Ivy in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Ilsa in Casablanca, her most iconic role; and Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

  She remembered the thrill of at last getting to portray her beloved Joan of Arc and recalled the final lines of Joan of Lorraine by the playwright Maxwell Anderson, which seemed to apply to her own life: “Nobody can use her for an alien purpose. Her own meaning will always come through.” In her library of books about Joan, she still had a small parcel of soil from Orléans, France.

  Though she really needed to rest, she had one last trip to make. On August 10, Schmidt took Ingrid to Sweden. They went first to Stockholm, where they took walks and lingered outside the Royal Dramatic Theatre and sat on the benches along Strandvägen and Djurgården, where Ingrid had studied scripts so many years ago. In memory of her parents, she released flower petals and watched them fall into the bay.

  When their boat reached Danholmen, Ingrid had to be carried from the dock to the house and was so exhausted that she stayed in bed for several days. Rallying, she made her way to the doorway to feel the sun and breathe the fresh air. Each day, she managed a few more steps, finally reaching all of her favorite spots on the island, including the flat rock where she used to read scripts and books. S
he sat for a while, looking out at the water, and asked Schmidt to make sure that her ashes were scattered there. He promised he would.

  When Ingrid and Schmidt traveled back to London on Friday, August 27, they brought along her cousin Britt. That night, Ingrid talked to Todd on the phone, telling her how worn out she felt. She wanted to sleep but couldn’t. Her pain was so severe that Dr. MacLellan prescribed painkillers. On Saturday, she glanced at flowers and cards sent to wish her a happy birthday. On Sunday, she would turn sixty-seven. Champagne was on ice for the occasion.

  Ingrid did not sleep well on Saturday but awoke early the morning of her birthday, August 29, 1982. She insisted on getting dressed and putting on a little makeup. Schmidt, James, Johnstone, and Britt stayed with her throughout the afternoon, keeping her company as she read and drifted in and out of sleep. Each of her four children called to wish her a happy birthday. “There, you see,” she told them. “I have made it through another year.”

  At Ingrid’s insistence, the champagne was opened at six that evening, and the small gathering at her Chelsea home drank one last toast. Two hours later, Ingrid told them she needed to go to bed. Then, alone in her bed, in the final hours of her sixty-seventh birthday, she died.

  At her bedside was a copy of The Little Prince, opened to a page near the end, when the prince is dying. “I cannot carry this body with me. It is too heavy,” it reads. “... But it will be like an old abandoned shell. There is nothing sad about old shells . . . I shall look as if I were dead, but that will not be true . . .”

  Ingrid’s funeral was held on September 2, 1982, at the Swedish Protestant Church in London, her adopted home. After being hounded by the press for most of her life, she was mourned privately in a small ceremony that included only her family and a few close friends.

  Ingrid’s remains were cremated, and most of the ashes were scattered in the sea around her beloved Danholmen Island as she had requested. The remaining portion was interred next to her parents’ ashes in the Norra Begravningsplatsen cemetery in Stockholm.

  In October, a public memorial service for 1,200 people was held in one of London’s great churches, St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Sir John Gielgud, who had directed her in The Constant Wife, read “Our revels now are ended” from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Schoolchildren sang the cheery tune This Old Man, from her film, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. Her friend the Swedish operatic soprano Birgit Nilsson sang a Beethoven composition that was one of Ingrid’s favorites. Another friend, the actor Joss Ackland, read from The Little Prince.

  “Despite her long fight against illness,” Pia said at the service, “my mother, even at the end, was still laughing and joking. Her good spirits did not suffer through her suffering. She managed to turn her tragedies into acts of courage. She was a brave and gallant woman.”

  At the 1982 Primetime Emmy Awards in September, Ingrid posthumously won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or Movie for A Woman Called Golda. Pia accepted the award for her mother. Ingrid also won a posthumous Golden Globe.

  It was not until after Ingrid’s death that people realized just how much she had suffered during the making of her last film. “Not only did she have cancer,” wrote Charlotte Chandler in her 2008 book, Ingrid: Ingrid Bergman, A Personal Biography, “but it was spreading, and if anyone had known how bad it was, no one would have gone on with the project.”

  After watching the series on television, her daughter Isabella said, “She never showed herself like that in life. In life, Mum showed courage. [But] she was always a little vulnerable, courageous, but vulnerable. Mother had a sort of presence, like Golda, I was surprised to see it . . . When I saw her performance, I saw a mother that I’d never seen before - this woman with balls.”

  In the history of cinema, few movie stars worked in so many languages and styles and in so many countries. She was filmed in five languages and seven countries in a forty-seven-year career that began with her portrayal of Elsa Edlund in 1935’s The Count of the Monk’s Bridge in Sweden and ended with Golda Meir in 1982. In all, she appeared in fifty big-screen films, eleven stage productions, and five television movies.

  Ingrid won every award available to an actress, including three Oscars (Best Actress for Gaslight and Anastasia and Best Supporting Actress for Murder on the Orient Express). Only five actors have won as many Oscars – Walter Brennan, Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, and Daniel Day-Lewis also had two each; Katharine Hepburn holds the record with four. The world’s finest directors wanted to work with Ingrid, from Ingmar Bergman to Alfred Hitchcock (Notorious remained her favorite Hitchcock film), and she was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Meanwhile, her stage acting was so exquisite that she was pursued by the era’s greatest playwrights, including George Bernard Shaw and Eugene O’Neill.

  As celebrated as Ingrid was during her lifetime, the accolades continued after her death as her contributions to cinema, theater, and popular culture became clearer with the passage of time. Ingrid Bergman was “arguably the most international star in the history of entertainment,” wrote her biographer Donald Spoto.

  She made her mark in other ways, too. In 1939, after launching her Hollywood career with Intermezzo: A Love Story, she broke new ground as a star who did not need makeup to be stunningly beautiful, creating a unique identity with her natural look. Film historian David Thomson pointed out that she “always strove to be a ‘true’ woman.” The celebrated writer James Agee, with a touch of sarcasm, noted that Ingrid “not only bears a startling resemblance to an imaginable human being; she really knows how to act, in a blend of poetic grace with quiet realism.”

  George Cukor, who directed Ingrid in Gaslight, once said to her, “Do you know what I especially love about you, Ingrid, my dear? I can sum it up as your naturalness. The camera loves your beauty, your acting, and your individuality. A star must have individuality. It makes you a great star. A great star.”

  Still, despite her star power, Ingrid remained a humble team player. While other stars chafed at the restrictive Hollywood studio system, Ingrid pronounced herself “completely pleased” with mogul David O. Selznick’s management of her career during her first years in Hollywood. Though she had strong opinions about her art and never shied away from expressing them bluntly, she was always the consummate professional on the set, eschewing the usual tantrums of the temperamental star who insists on being constantly pampered; she did not renege on commitments, and rarely complained about what she was paid. “I am an actress, and I am interested in acting,” she once said, “not in making money.”

  Her impact on American and world culture was as profound as her accomplishments. The uproar over her affair with Roberto Rossellini exposed the hypocrisy of the moral arbiters of the day and prefigured the women’s liberation movement as Ingrid demanded the freedom to determine her own fate rather than conform to society’s mores. As more than one commentator has noted, nobody would have blinked an eye if a famous, successful man had an extramarital affair that took him far away from his child – and today such behavior, even by a woman, hardly rates as a scandal.

  “I don’t think anyone has the right to intrude in your life,” Ingrid said upon her return to the United States in 1956, “but they do.”

  Even before she had even met Rossellini - when people began to mistake her for Joan of Arc or Sister Mary Benedict in The Bells of St. Mary’s - Ingrid asked only to be judged as a human being. “I cannot understand why people think I’m pure and full of nobleness,” she said. “Every human being has shades of bad and good.”

  Years after her passing, Ingrid’s influence can still be felt. Her life inspired not only actors and filmmakers, but artists in other fields as well. Her affair with Robert Capa provided the basis of a 2012 novel, Seducing Ingrid Bergman, by Chris Greenhalgh, who also sold the film rights to Hollywood.

  Woody Guthrie, meanwhile, wrote a song called “Ingrid Bergman.” He never recorded it, but Billy Bragg did on the album Mermaid Avenue. He sang, in part:

&n
bsp; Ingrid Bergman, Ingrid Bergman

  Let’s go make a picture

  On the island of Stromboli

  Ingrid Bergman

  Ingrid Bergman, you’re so perty

  You’d make any mountain quiver

  You’d make fire fly from the crater

  Ingrid Bergman

  On the centennial of her birth in 2015, Ingrid’s children helped celebrate the occasion with two major events. Isabella Rossellini recruited the actor Jeremy Irons to help her put on a stage production, The Ingrid Bergman Tribute, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The actors took turns reading from Ingrid’s memoir and presented interviews, letters, and previously unreleased video clips about the woman Irons called “the most luminous of actresses.”

  That same year, a documentary entitled Ingrid Bergman – In Her Own Words had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Directed by the Swedish writer, critic, and director Stig Björkman, the film used letters, diary entries, snapshots, and archival video footage to create what The Guardian called “a complex portrait of one of Hollywood’s true mavericks.”

  “The Ingrid Bergman revealed here is impossibly talented, impulsive, headstrong, and difficult,” The Guardian said. “She’s also warm, charming, and magnetic. Anyone who watches this lively documentary will fall a little bit in love with one of cinema’s romantic rebels.”

  As The New York Times noted, even such a celebratory documentary could not hide the pain that persisted in Ingrid’s life, from the early death of her mother and father to the difficult divorces from her three husbands to her prolonged absence from the lives of her four children.

  But even her kids held no grudges, and in the documentary, they became radiant at the chance to discuss their remarkable mother. “One word to define mama,” Isabella said, “I’d say charm.” Pia spoke for Ingrid Bergman’s legions of fans and admirers everywhere when she added, “The only thing that I think any of her children feel is we wish we had more of her.”