Ingrid Bergman, the actress America condemned and couldn’t stop watching

Ingrid Bergman

Photo: Arthur Cantor / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 29, 1915 Stockholm, Sweden
Died	August 29, 1982 (67)
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Casablanca, Notorious, Murder on the Orient Express
Awards	3 Academy Award · Tony Award · Emmy

On a March afternoon, a senator stood on the floor of the United States Senate and declared war on an actress. Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado named Ingrid Bergman “a powerful influence for evil” and proposed legislation to bar “morally trespassing” foreigners from working in American films. She had not committed a crime. She had left her husband, fallen in love with an Italian director, and refused to pretend otherwise. Hollywood had spent a decade constructing her as a symbol of female virtue — and now faced the consequence of building an idol: when the idol acts like a person, the believers feel personally betrayed.

She arrived in a Stockholm hospital on August 29, 1915 — her father a Swedish photographer, her mother German and already dying; Frieda Adler Bergman was dead before Ingrid turned three. Justus Samuel Bergman raised his daughter alone and died in 1929, leaving her in the care of an aunt who died within the year. She was passed to an uncle, and trained at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre School at seventeen, carrying with her a 16mm camera her father had given her and an inherited eye for what a frame could hold.

The trajectory from Stockholm to Hollywood was startlingly swift. Her performance in the Swedish Intermezzo (1936) caught producer David O. Selznick’s attention; he brought her to Hollywood to remake it in English. The 1939 American Intermezzo launched her, and what followed was a decade of roles the studio system assembled into an architecture of female virtue: selfless lovers, devoted heroines, women defined by their sacrifices. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) confirmed her box-office weight. Casablanca (1942) — a film she apparently found difficult to care about during production — made her a permanent figure of collective memory.

Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight (1944) — Ingrid Bergman in *Gaslight* (1944)

Gaslight (1944) brought her first Academy Award, for a performance in which she played a woman being methodically convinced she was losing her mind — a role that has aged into something more psychologically interesting than its original reception allowed. Alfred Hitchcock then directed her in Spellbound (1945) and the more precise, more unsettling Notorious (1946), in which she played a woman deployed as a spy by the man she loves. These weren’t films that required her to be pure. They required her to be complicated. She was better at it than the studio wanted to admit.

The purity myth was commercial infrastructure. She had played nuns and martyrs and saints — appearing as Jeanne d’Arc in Joan of Arc (1948) at the height of her holiness currency — and this was what American audiences were purchasing. It was also, she later suggested, a persona she found genuinely puzzling. “People saw me in Joan of Arc, and declared me a saint,” she said. “I’m not. I’m just a woman, another human being.” The problem with manufacturing that kind of image is that the person inside it is still a person.

In 1949 she wrote to Roberto Rossellini — a letter expressing admiration for his film Rome, Open City and offering to work with him. The film they made together was Stromboli (1950), shot on a volcanic Italian island. She became pregnant during production; Rossellini was not her husband. Johnson’s Senate condemnation followed in March 1950. She described receiving bags of hate mail: “Dirty whore. Bitch.” She married Rossellini that May and stayed in Europe. Their marriage produced three children, including the actress Isabella Rossellini. The marriage ended in 1957.

The films she made with Rossellini — Stromboli, Europa ’51 (1952), Journey to Italy (1954) — were commercial failures and critical dismissals at the time. The revisionist account arrived two decades later, placing them among the foundational works of modern European cinema. That gap between contemporary failure and eventual canonization is a structural feature of her career: she was repeatedly somewhere the audience wasn’t ready for.

Anastasia (1956) was her return to Hollywood — and the industry, apparently forgiving without having formally apologized, gave her a second Academy Award. Senator Charles Percy of Illinois issued a formal apology in 1972 on behalf of the Congress, long after the damage had been absorbed. She was philosophical about it. She had other work to do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDOTDB2cTSg

Murder on the Orient Express (1974) produced her third Oscar — Best Supporting Actress, in a brief role she claimed to have taken as a favor and won by accident. Autumn Sonata (1978), directed by the unrelated Ingmar Bergman, brought a sixth Academy Award nomination and a formal reckoning on screen with the idea that a great artist could also be a remote and inadequate parent — Liv Ullmann played her daughter in a confrontation neither character could quite survive. She accepted the reading without much argument.

She died on August 29, 1982 — her 67th birthday — in London, from breast cancer diagnosed eight years earlier. She had spent those final years working. A Woman Called Golda (1982), a television film about Golda Meir, earned her a posthumous Emmy. The Senate that had condemned her and the Academy that had rewarded her three times ultimately agreed on the same thing she had insisted on throughout: that what mattered was the work.