Ingrid Bergman: The actor who was denounced as a “powerful influence for evil”
Modern media publications may seem pretty savage, and, especially in the UK, they certainly are, but it’s easy to forget just how much better things have gotten since the wild west of the 20th century. In the golden years of Hollywood and beyond, scandals ran rampant, and the press had a field day working out who was the culprit before often forgetting actually to hold them to account.
Such stories have been written into the history books of the movie industry, creating a mysterious allure around the hills of Hollywood, a place where fame and tragedy run riot. From the actor Judy Garland being forcibly starved to look thinner to the story of Peg Entwistle, who committed suicide by jumping off the iconic Hollywood sign, the land donned ‘Tinsel Town’ is far darker than the industry would want you to think.
Another very public scandal was the story of actor Ingrid Bergman and her affair with the famed director Roberto Rossellini. Married to the doctor Petter Lindström, once Bergman announced she was having a child with the filmmaker, the pair divorced so that they could be together, but the public couldn’t seem to get over the fact that the Casablanca star had cheated on her husband and had had a child out of wedlock.
Bafflingly, the scandal went further than the salacious front pages of the newspapers, even going so far as the United States Senate. During a meeting on March 14th, 1950, Senator Edwin C. Johnson stated that Bergman “had perpetrated an assault upon the institution of marriage” before calling her “a powerful influence for evil” in a needlessly fiery attack on the three-time Oscar-winning actor.
According to Art Buchwald, who read the fan letters Bergman received during the scandal, much of the mail was violent and threatening, as detailed in the book Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca – Bogart, Bergman, and World War II. “Oh, that mail was bad,” he started, “Ten, twelve, fourteen huge mail bags. ‘Dirty whore.’ ‘Bitch.’ ‘Son of a bitch.’ And they were all Christians who wrote it”.
Collaborating together on such movies as Europa ’51, Viaggio in Italia and La Paura, Bergman and Rossellini made some of the greatest movies of the century before the pair divorced in 1957. Bergman later married the Swedish filmmaker Lars Schmidt in 1958, before they too, divorced 17 years later after Bergman had suffered from extensive exposure to the media.
Take a look at Bergman speaking about Rossellini in the video below, where she breaks down her love for the director and her dismay at their criticism.
