In August 1949, headlines around the world revealed a scandal involving a beautiful Hollywood film star, her surgeon husband and her lover, a famous Italian film director.
It was a cause célèbre that whipped America into a moralistic frenzy, and the press heaped vituperation on Ingrid Bergman's head for ruthlessly abandoning her fine husband and defenceless 10-year-old daughter to run off to Italy to join the married Roberto Rossellini, whose child she was carrying. Most people reserved their sympathy for the wronged husband, Dr Petter Lindstrom, who has died aged 93.
The affair even reached Capitol Hill. There, on March 14 1950, Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado delivered a vitriolic diatribe to the United States senate, denouncing Bergman for "an assault upon the institution of marriage". He considered her to be "one of the most powerful women on earth today - I regret to say, a powerful influence for evil".
In the moral climate of the time, to bear a child out of wedlock was unacceptable, though none of the fuss might have occurred if Lindstrom had granted Bergman a divorce when she asked for it. As for deserting her husband for another man, as Bergman herself reflected, divorces and remarriages in the film community were an everyday occurrence.
Why, then, was she forced to pay such a heavy price? Because, for the American public, the Swedish actress - who had recently played a nun in The Bells Of St Mary's and the heroine in Saint Joan - represented integrity, moral decency and family values, and they could not forgive her for betraying their faith in her perfection.
Bergman had met Lindstrom in Stockholm in 1933, shortly after her 18th birthday, when a cousin persuaded her to make up a foursome for a night out. The son of flower farmers, he was a handsome, hardworking dentist, and, to a naive girl like Bergman, the epitome of worldly sophistication. He was 25, and had dental and medical degrees from Heidelberg and Leipzig universities. He owned a car, was a fine sportsman and an excellent dancer, and had a good sense of humour. Highly intelligent, he was a model of old-fashioned moral virtues.
Three years later, after Bergman had created a stir in her sixth film, Intermezzo, the couple got married. In 1939, their daughter Pia was born, and Intermezzo was shown in New York. When producer David Selznick offered Bergman a Hollywood contract, Lindstrom encouraged her to go, he and Pia following a few months later.
Having settled in Beverly Hills, both Lindstrom's and Bergman's careers advanced. He moved from dentistry to lecturing in medicine, eventually becoming a renowned brain surgeon; she won her first Oscar, for Gaslight (1944). But Bergman was not happy.
For all Lindstrom's virtues, his dominating attitudes curtailed her sense of freedom. He was critical of her, and made her look and feel foolish and inhibited. He was also puritanically frugal, restricting her ability to enjoy the luxuries they could now afford. She suggested divorce, but he refused - and they settled back into a solid, but, for Bergman, emotionally unsatisfying existence.
One evening in 1948, the couple went to see Rossellini's neo-realist masterpiece, Rome: Open City. Bergman was shattered by it. After seeing his Paisa a few months later, she became obsessed with a desire to make a film with Rossellini. She even wrote him a fan letter. "I am ready," she said, "to come and make a film with you."
In 1948, when Bergman and Lindstrom met the Italian director in Paris for the first time, Rossellini suggested she should appear in Stromboli. Her husband was sceptical, but Bergman was carried away with the idea. Rossellini went to stay with the Lindstroms in Los Angeles for further discussions on the film, and it was after the shooting of Stromboli was completed that Bergman told Lindstrom she would not be returning.
There began a tormented and protracted correspondence between them, with Bergman begging for a divorce and contact with her daughter, and Lindstrom refusing both. In February 1950, a week after the birth of Robertino, her child with Rossellini, she obtained a Mexican divorce by proxy. Jean Renoir, a friend of both Bergman and Lindstrom, tried to help them and Pia through the emotional difficulties.
"It makes me so happy to hear that Petter is often with you," Bergman wrote to Renoir. "Take care of him. Maybe you, Jean, whose life, I'm sure, has been difficult, confusing and tossed like a shipwreck, maybe you can explain to Petter that sometimes people leave and they don't go back. The trouble is I don't feel sinful. I'm unhappy so that it almost breaks my heart for what Pia must go through, and also Petter, though he could have helped and finished this thing earlier."
It was not until 1957 that Bergman was reunited with Pia, by then 18, in Rome - and even that meeting was against Lindstrom's wishes. He remained bitter towards Bergman, and told her biographer, Laurence Leamer, that he regretted not telling the world years earlier of an Ingrid Bergman they did not know - a hard-drinking, heavy-smoking, promiscuous woman, who, according to Lindstrom, ignored her children and lived only to act.
Lindstrom taught medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Utah, and later practised in San Francisco and San Diego. In 1954, he married Dr Agnes Ronavec, who survives him, as does Pia, the four children of his second marriage, Karl, Peter, Michael and Brita, and eight grandchildren.
He was, recalled Brita, a wonderful man. But while Lindstrom achieved fame as a brain surgeon, sadly that never obliterated his reputation as one of the most celebrated of Hollywood cuckolds.