The iconic James Stewart movie inspired by Ingrid Bergman’s real life
You don’t often have movies based on an actor’s life that are made during the peak of their career. There are plenty of biopics, of course. Chaplin, My Week with Marilyn, and Judy were all sweeping, Oscar-bait takes on real-life stars, but they were all made long after their subjects had died. It would be strange to make a biopic about Florence Pugh or Timothée Chalamet in 2025, even if you changed the main character’s name. Still, the lives of the rich and famous provide plenty of fodder for creative inspiration, which is how a moment in Ingrid Bergman’s past became the loose subject matter of a James Stewart film.
If you were to hazard a guess as to which part of Bergman’s life would become a Hollywood film, you’d probably instantly jump to the conclusion that it was her infamous affair with Roberto Rossellini that turned her into a literal Hollywood exile. When she left her husband Petter Lindström and young daughter for the Italian filmmaker, even US politicians in Washington questioned whether she should be allowed back in the country.
However, the incident that inspired this particular film happened just after World War II, when Bergman was in Europe to entertain the troops. Shortly after VE Day, she met war photographer Robert Capa, the only civilian photographer present at the landing of Omaha Beach on D-Day. Her marriage to Lindström was already falling apart, and she and Capa began a two-year affair.
Capa joined her in Hollywood, where she was shooting the Alfred Hitchcock film Notorious, but he found the shallowness and glamour of the town to be stifling. They separated, and he went back to war coverage. She left Hollywood in 1950, and he died in 1954 at the age of 40 after stepping on a landmine in Vietnam.
Their affair might have been short-lived, but Hitchcock must have been observing them during the production of Notorious because he drew on their relationship for his film Rear Window. It also centred on a war photographer who worked for Life magazine, and it was released the year Capa died. Instead of hiring Bergman for the part of the glamorous girlfriend, Lisa, he looked to Grace Kelly, while Stewart played the photographer, LB Jeffries.
Rear Window is defined by its set-up—a man who is stuck in his apartment due to a broken leg witnesses a murder in one of his neighbours’ apartments through his telephoto lens. However, the relationship between Lisa and Jeff is surprisingly, and possibly even unnecessarily, complex. She fawns over him and is clearly head-over-heels in love, while he is bitter and even cruel about her career as a model and disdainful towards her love of fashion.
It’s hard not to see the parallels between Bergman and Capa’s relationship. Capa wasn’t confined to a small apartment over a broken leg, but he was a man of action and adventure who, when confronted by the relative imprisonment of Hollywood, was desperate to get out. Fortunately, Lisa and Jeff’s romance ends on a happier note. She demonstrates during the murder investigation that she is a lot more adventurous than he ever suspected, and he finds enough excitement in the ordeal to soothe his restlessness (and break his other leg).
