TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/82/82bergmn

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                                                                                September 13, 1982 

The Price of Redemption 

Ingrid Bergman:  1915-1982



"I was given courage, a sense of adventure and a little bit of
humor. I have had a wonderful life. I have never regretted
what I did."  The odor of bitter irony, intentional or not,
arises from this simple declaration by Ingrid Bergman. She was
a wise, sober and gifted woman, wryly self-aware in a manner
unusual in her profession, gallant in a way that is rare
anywhere. But once, many years ago, she had an extramarital
affair with one of her directors--an event not without precedent
in human history--and the shape of her life and her career was
distorted forever.

Here she was in 1949:  an Academy Award-winning actress, for the
preceding three years one of the two most popular female stars in
America (the other was Betty Grable), going off to Italy to make
Stromboli with Neorealist Master Roberto Rossellini. Soon there
were hints that something more than professional respect formed
their relationship, rumors devastatingly confirmed by the
illegitimate birth of her first child by Rossellini. Her first
husband won custody of their child in an ugly divorce action,
there was a vicious denunciation in the U.S. Senate, and,
finally, what might have been the best years of her career were
blanked out before timorous Hollywood let her come back in 1956,
playing a woman safely desexualized by old age in Anastasia.

What all that cost her emotionally she never fully explained,
because she never directly answered her moral critics. But the
cost to her work is obvious. Her career regained some momentum,
but never again the mature and more interesting direction in
which it once seemed to be heading. Until the day she wrote
Rossellini a letter, offering to work for him, she had enjoyed
a lucky life. As a Stockholm teen-ager, she got the first movie
job she ever tried for. By the time she turned 24 she had made
eleven movies, including Intermezzo, in which she played a young
pianist who has a bittersweet affair with an older man, a famous
violinist. David O. Selznick had bought the remake rights to
1939 and brought Bergman to Hollywood to re-create her role
opposite Leslie Howard. The film made her a star, and Selznick
made an image for this shy, frugal, occasionally awkward young
woman:  no makeup, no eyebrow plucking, no glamorizing. It was
a fresh angle, and it worked especially well in the wartime
'40s, when frivolous excess was regarded as unpatriotic. The
gurgling approval of the women's clubs and pictures like The
Bells of St. Mary's and Joan of Arc were almost inevitable.

"They had put me on a pedestal," Bergman said of the Rossellini
episode, "and they felt they had been cheated, that I had
betrayed them."   But "they" must not have been paying attention.
Joan the saint and Ingrid the woman both had capacity for
speaking the truth and for listening when conscience spoke. In
Bergman's case it always spoke in artistic terms. As early as
1941 she had insisted on swapping roles with Lane Turner, so
that she could play the tart instead of the good girl in Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and she edged her vulnerability with an
enigmatic neuroticism. Or was it eroticism?  Casablanca, in
which she and Humphrey Bogart yield briefly to nostalgic love,
argues for the latter. "You'll have to think for both of us..."
she moaned when she finally fell into his arms, and several
million American males would have volunteered for that kind of
cerebration. Placed in a different romantic torment, as Charles
Boyer drove her crazy in Gaslight, she seemed as much victimized
by her yearning heart as by his murderous greed.

She won her first and best-deserved Oscar for that performance.
(Others were for Anastasia and Murder on the Orient Express.)
But it was in Hitchcock's Notorious that she gave her most
complex romantic portrayal. As a reluctant, psychologically
troubled spy forced to marry into the enemy camp to ferret out
its secrets, she allows herself to be treated sadistically by
Cary Grant as the "good" agent. Here she paid not just the
price of love but the price of redemption from some deeper
despair, which she judged that love could provide. It is a
highly sensual characterization, at once knowing, acceptant
and brave.

These were qualities Bergman would have ample opportunity to
exercise in life as it proceeded to imitate art in the years
ahead. But there is no question that she would rather have
framed them within a growing art. That was not to be. Her
later career was mostly a patchwork of dignified stage work and
technically proficient character roles in the movies until, in
1977, Swedish Writer-Director Ingmar Bergman cost her in Autumn
Sonata. In it she played an aging concert pianist trying to
reclaim the love of the daughter she had emotionally abandoned
for her career. "My friends feel this is not acting--this is
me," she said. But if the role resonated with autobiography,
it was still played with objectivity and fierce control. Last
year she played the long, exhausting role of Golda Meir in a
TV movie. By then she had been fighting cancer for seven years,
and though she spoke openly about the disease that would
eventually kill her, she did so calmly, without self-pity or
false heroics.

On the evening she died last week in London, she roused herself
from her sick-bed to join a few friends in a champagne toast to
her birthday. Besides that final beau geste she left behind a
haunting epitaph, claiming she was a great actress because "she
had acted on the last day of her life."  Robbed by circumstances
of the chance to play that one immortalizing part every actress
aspires to, she had instead turned her whole life into such a
role. Her last words represent an artist's final shaping touch
on the legend that is, perforce, her monument. Yes, she knew.
Yes, she accepted. And, as always, she convinced.

--By Richard Schickel