Remembering Ingrid Bergman at 100
The term “classic Hollywood beauty” could most likely have been created to describe Ingrid Bergman, she would have been a 100 years old this month. Bergman, whose birth and death, in 1982, fell on the same day, August 29,collected numerous awards throughout her career including three Oscars, four Golden Globes, two Emmys, and a Tony.
Several special events are planned to celebrate Bergman’s life, says her daughter Pia Lindström.
“The Museum of Modern Art is hosting a film retrospective in New York, beginning on August 29,” said Lindström, a respected television journalist, theater critic, and current radio host on Sirius XM Satellite Radio. “I will introduce three of her films: “Casablanca,” “Notorious,” and “Autumn Sonata,” and my sisters will also introduce films. An Ingrid Bergman stamp will be released in both Sweden and the U.S., and I will go to Washington, D.C., on Sept. 9 for the stamp ceremony.”
Named after a princess from her native Sweden, Bergman was the darling of Hollywood for much of her early career until suffering the wrath of the American public and press after abandoning her adopted country and returning to Europe with director Roberto Rossellini. The couple produced three children, Isabella, Ingrid, and Roberto Jr., giving step-siblings to Pia, Bergman’s daughter from the earlier marriage to Petter Lindström.
Bergman’s children will also be traveling to Sweden to celebrate their mother’s life.
“We are all going to Stockholm where the Royal Dramatic Theatre is having a celebration of my mother’s 100th birth date, said Lindström. “They will show a new documentary about her, and Liv Ullman will host the evening.”
Lindström was two years old when her parents left Sweden for America.
“My mother went to California to work while I stayed with my father in Rochester, New York, where he taught at a local university,” she recalled. “But I always looked forward to her visits. We would play and go on toboggan rides.”
The pair eventually moved to California, reuniting the family as her mother’s fame grew. But to Pia, her mother was just a mom.
“One of my best friends was Maria Cooper, and when we got together, we didn’t talk about how famous our parents were,” said Lindström. “I would go over to her house and Gary Cooper would be making hamburgers on the grill like other dads.”
Unfortunately, Pia’s dad didn’t easily accept his wife’s fame.
“I don’t think he was prepared for what would happen to her in Hollywood. There’s a momentum to the life of an actor that is almost unstoppable in the beginning, like a runaway train. I’m sure my mother found it a fun ride, but my father wasn’t prepared to see us constantly photographed and his family privacy invaded.”
In 1949, when Pia was 10, Bergman headed to Italy to make a film for Rossellini.
“The only time I saw her was once in London. I didn’t see her again until I was 18, when I visited her in Paris,” said Lindström.
The public of the early 1950s didn’t take kindly to Bergman’s abandonment of family and becoming pregnant with Rossellini’s child.
“Mama played the “good girl” in many of her films and was perceived as a vulnerable, natural, country beauty, without pretense, not as a seductive vamp who would betray her husband,” explained Lindström. Her departure to Europe also irritated Hollywood. “It was perceived as being personally disloyal and professionally snubbing Hollywood when she left the United States to have an Italian film career.”
But Bergman had no career misgivings. “She was very happy that she was doing what she loved. She fell in love and always said she had no regrets. That train I mentioned earlier? It just kept moving on for her.”
Eventually, Hollywood embraced Bergman again, presenting her with a second Oscar for “Anastasia” in 1956 and a third in 1974 for a somewhat brief appearance in “Murder on the Orient Express.”
“I suspect that was Hollywood doing a kiss and make up: We raised you up, knocked you down, then let you come back not quite as big as you were, but we still love you!” said Lindström.
Today, Bergman is one of the most celebrated actresses from Hollywood’s Golden Era revered for her natural beauty and talent and especially for her role in the beloved classic “Casablanca.” But it was a difficult production for Ingrid.
“She said she did not have a pleasant experience making it,” said Lindström. “They didn’t have a finished script and changed writers in the middle of shooting. My mother asked the director, Michael Curtiz, who she was supposed to be in love with — Humphrey Bogart or Paul Henreid? He didn’t know then, so he told her to “play it in the middle.” The audience didn’t know who she was going to end up with until the very end and neither did she! As for Bogart, she had no connection with him at all. She said, “I kissed him, but I never knew him.” Their on-screen “chemistry” was all acting.”
Ironically, Lindström says her favorite Bergman film is “Autumn Sonata” (1978).
“The story is about a mother who has a musical gift, and leaves her daughter to pursue her career,” she explained. “If you have an exceptional gift, do you use it and go where that talent takes you? Or, do you stay at home and nurse your children through chickenpox and take them to baseball games? It addressed a theme that runs through many lives.”
Lindström believes that her mother’s death at the age of 67 on the same day she was born was more than just coincidence.
“I believe she chose that date to die,” she said. “There is a kind of symmetry to it, the sort of thing she would have liked. I find it fitting, a closing of the circle of her life.”
Nick Thomas teaches at Auburn University at Montgomery, Ala., and has written features, columns, and interviews for over 600 magazines and newspapers. Follow @TinseltownTalks