A career in three acts: The three movies that define Ingrid Bergman
When Ingrid Bergman arrived in Hollywood in 1939, she was already a celebrity in her native Sweden. With a radiant, cherubic face and quiet intelligence, the 24-year-old wasn’t exactly a carbon copy of glamorous stars like Bette Davis and Vivian Leigh, who were dominating the box office at the time, but she knew what type of actor she wanted to be. She had been spotted by Hollywood mogul David O Selznick, and although she accepted his invitation to come to the US, she refused to change her name or swap her natural beauty for a studio makeover.
Throughout her five-decade career, Bergman remained fiercely independent, even as she was typecast as an unassailable “good girl” in her movies. When, in the 1950s, she was banished from Hollywood and the United States for her affair with Italian film director Roberto Rossellini, she pivoted to European cinema, appearing in some of the best movies of her career.
When she died of breast cancer in 1982, Bergman had won three Academy Awards over a three-decade period and had just completed a critically acclaimed performance as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in A Woman Called Golda. Her career went through an extraordinary evolution shaped by personal struggles and external pressures, but her longevity was the result of her own devotion to her craft.
Though it’s difficult to narrow down her accomplishments to just three performances, we’re looking at three films that defined three distinct phases of her career.
The movies that define Ingrid Bergman:
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
It’s easy to forget that when Casablanca was released, it wasn’t received as the landmark romance of the 20th century the way it is today. Nor was it akin to Citizen Kane, which was ahead of its time and driven by a single-minded auteur. It was simply another studio-led production about the war shot on a soundstage by contract players who had nothing more than a cordial working relationship off-screen.
The story follows cynical American expat Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), who operates a restaurant in Vichy-occupied Casablanca. When his old flame, Ilsa (Bergman), walks into his club with her husband, who is a member of the Czech resistance, Rick has the option to either help her and her husband escape and potentially help win the war or do nothing, just as he has been doing. He, of course, opts for the former and, in a final act of self-sacrifice, forces Ilsa to board the flight to safety, too.
Bergman had been in Hollywood for just three years when Casablanca was released; it was her first major success. She is luminous in the film, with careful lighting and close-ups capturing the contours of her face and the glistening of her tears as she weighs all of her impossible options. It set the tone for her on-screen persona, and she would continue to portray selfless women who suffer nobly through the poor hands they are dealt as long as she was in Hollywood.
Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954)
Despite being one of Hollywood’s biggest stars by the late 1940s, Bergman had her sights set elsewhere. Around 1949, she wrote a letter to Italian director Roberto Rossellini, whose pioneering work in neo-realism was having a profound effect on the European film industry. He invited her to star in his upcoming film Stromboli, and she eagerly travelled to Europe. When she fell in love with the filmmaker and became pregnant, however, it evolved into an international scandal, largely because she had left her husband and first child in America. Even the US government weighed in, with Senator Edwin C Johnson accusing her of being “a powerful influence for evil” and saying that “under the law, no alien guilty of turpitude can set foot on American soil again”.
In response, Bergman embraced life in Europe, acting in movies in multiple languages, including for French director Jean Renoir and her eventual husband, Rossellini. Her most extraordinary work of this period was Journey to Italy, Rossellini’s intimate portrait of a marriage in turmoil. Bergman and George Sanders star as a middle-aged English couple who travel to Naples and find themselves confronting the distance that has grown between them. Sections of the film were improvised, and lengthy scenes were shot outside in the rocky ruins of Pompeii. For an actor who was defined in her early career by playing overwrought love interests in Hollywood melodramas, Bergman’s ability to emote through silence and body language is stunning, her minute facial expressions heartbreaking.
Journey to Italy is now widely known for being the direct inspiration of the French New Wave, but Bergman’s aching performance deserves its own legacy.
Autumn Sonata (Ingmar Bergman, 1978)
Bergman eventually made a triumphant return to Hollywood in the late ‘50s, winning her second Oscar for the grandiose period drama Anastasia in 1957, but her career went full circle in earnest when she returned to Swedish cinema. In an echo of her letter to Rossellini in the late ‘40s, Bergman sent a letter to Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (who was unrelated to the actor) sometime in the ‘60s, asking to work with him. A decade later, they collaborated on Autumn Sonata.
The film stars Bergman as a classical concert pianist who returns home to her adult daughter (Liv Ullmann) after a seven-year absence. Like most of the director’s films, it is an intensely personal exploration of a troubled relationship. Although Ullmann’s performance is full of raw nerve endings, Bergman’s is eerily cold until she finally cracks.
For once in Bergman’s career, the focus isn’t on her radiant beauty but on the story of struggle and weariness shown on her face, with the camera searching for the tiniest of expressions that will betray her true feelings. It’s a heartbreaking role that bore echoes of the actor’s own biography – an ambitious parent leaving her eldest child to pursue her career. Whether or not Bergman drew from personal experience to give life to her character, the results are painfully moving and some of the best acting of her career.
