Ingrid Bergman Remembered - 1915 - 1982

Barbara Fan

Admin
LV
12
 
Messages
10,202
Reaction score
23,156
Awards
28
Location
Scotland
Member Since
2000
Favourite Movie
Witness, Vertigo, Spellbound
Yep the baby boomers got the money. So I can see why the advertising industry has finally woken up. :lol:

Still I like the fact that older women are suddenly being valued. Women and men should be valued equally regardless of their age.

I agree and I love to see an older actress that isnt face lifted to within an inch of her life
Its great to see Judy Dench as she should look at 81 and I think Susan Sarandon is amazing looking

Long may they reign.
 

Barbara Fan

Admin
LV
12
 
Messages
10,202
Reaction score
23,156
Awards
28
Location
Scotland
Member Since
2000
Favourite Movie
Witness, Vertigo, Spellbound

Oh she is like her mother! Lovely interview
 

Barbara Fan

Admin
LV
12
 
Messages
10,202
Reaction score
23,156
Awards
28
Location
Scotland
Member Since
2000
Favourite Movie
Witness, Vertigo, Spellbound
more of Ingrid









love BF x
 

Barbara Fan

Admin
LV
12
 
Messages
10,202
Reaction score
23,156
Awards
28
Location
Scotland
Member Since
2000
Favourite Movie
Witness, Vertigo, Spellbound
In loving memory of Ingrid Bergman who was born and also died on this day Aug 29th










Never forgotten
Love BF x
 

Barbara Fan

Admin
LV
12
 
Messages
10,202
Reaction score
23,156
Awards
28
Location
Scotland
Member Since
2000
Favourite Movie
Witness, Vertigo, Spellbound
Ingrid Bergman: 10 essential films

https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/ingrid-bergman-10-essential-films

From Casablanca to Notorious, we remember some of the best films starring one of classical Hollywood’s most luminous stars.

Radiant and expressive, Ingrid Bergman must stand next to Garbo as one of the most luminous foreign-born stars of the classical age. Plucked from Sweden’s film industry by super-producer David O. Selznick, Bergman refused a studio makeover, maintaining an unadorned look by 1940s standards of Hollywood glamour. As an actor, she was a consummate professional – keen to challenge herself and closely collaborating with her directors. Those collaborations even extended to Alfred Hitchcock, he of the famous “actors are like cattle” quip.

Her public image – that of a world-weary but unimpeachably ‘good’ woman — was shattered in the early 1950s when she left America – and her family – for a love affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini. In the vicious media circus that followed, Bergman was vilified in all corners for her ‘loose morals’. She nonetheless flourished in a handful of films directed by Rossellini, and went on to work with Jean Renoir and that other great Bergman in a stunning late career coup. Here are 10 of Ingrid Bergman’s essential films.

Casablanca (1942)
Director Michael Curtiz


Casablanca (1942)

A near perfect synthesis of wit, cynicism and romance, Casablanca remains an incredible example of Hollywood serendipity. The film hardly seemed a likely contender to become one of the most beloved of all time. Shooting was a jumbled and frustrating process. A slew of credited and uncredited writers rewrote the script on a daily basis. Bergman complained to producer Hal Wallis, wondering how to characterise the vacillating Ilsa when the screenwriters still hadn’t decided her fate. Even after its latter-day appreciation, Bergman could never quite understand its appeal. And somehow, in spite of all that, Casablanca moved far beyond the realm of wartime propaganda – becoming a distinguished pinnacle of the entire studio system.

Gaslight (1944)
Director George Cukor


Gaslight (1944)

Set in Victorian London, George Cukor’s psychological thriller stars Bergman as an unwitting new wife to a slick, manipulative murderer (Charles Boyer) who begins to convince her she is going mad. Torn between affection for her husband and increasing terror, Bergman avoids playing the faint-hearted victim, maintaining an understated, nervous demeanour instead. Her slow decline into hysteria won her the first of her best actress Oscars. Her put-on insanity in the final sequence, where she refuses to help a tied-up Boyer, is almost elemental in its vindictive glee. Gaslight is sophisticated and elevated genre material; a gothic melodrama with all the long shadows of noir, aided and abetted by a very strong cast.

The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945)
Director Leo McCarey


The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945)

This good-natured comedy starring Bing Crosby as a bumbling parish priest attempting to reform an inner-city Catholic school – with Bergman as a hard-headed young nun – is a light-hearted audience favourite. It’s certainly a far cry from the philosophical solemnity of her work with Rossellini – but the stars were in good hands with McCarey, whose comic credentials included Duck Soup (1933) and The Awful Truth (1937). It’s a meringue of a movie that feels like a cheerful respite for the often-serious Bergman – and it’s got some great gags.

Spellbound (1945)
Director Alfred Hitchcock


Spellbound (1945)

If for the Salvador Dalí dream sequence alone, Spellbound deserves a place on any celebration of Bergman’s film career. It also happens to be her first of three outings with Hitchcock, who cast her as a smitten psychoanalyst. She races to solve a murder in an attempt to protect the afflicted Gregory Peck, the object of her desire. According to Bergman, an extra Dalí sequence had lasted for 20 ingenious minutes before producer David O. Selznick called it “drivel” and cut it out altogether. Spellbound contains much in the way of dime-store Freud, and the repressed memories at the crux of the narrative are just this side of absurd, but the film glides through its sillier conceits on the charm and intensity of its two leads.

Notorious (1946)
Director Alfred Hitchcock


Notorious (1946)

Hitch envisioned his leading lady in a “Mata Hari type role” in this romantic espionage thriller. Bergman is Alicia Huberman, the dissolute and guilty daughter of a German spy. American agent Devlin (Cary Grant) uses her guilt to his advantage, sending her undercover to Rio to foil a Nazi plot. The government is happy to exploit Alicia’s much-remarked upon easy virtue to seduce an old acquaintance (an aristocratic, lovesick Claude Rains) for their covert plans. It’s a thoroughly adult, psychologically complex portrait of a love triangle – with a yearning between Grant and Bergman that’s sexy and palpable. Some of the most effective romantic scenes Hitchcock ever committed to celluloid can be found here, censor-defying kisses included.

Stromboli (1950)
Director Roberto Rossellini


Stromboli (1950)

A product of Bergman and Rossellini’s initial flirtatious correspondence, Stromboli became the first film to bring the pair together, artistically and otherwise. Bergman plays Karin, a Lithuanian war refugee so desperate to escape her conditions that she marries an Italian fisherman (Mario Vitale) and moves with him to the remote, traditional island of Stromboli. The pair live beneath the ominous shadow of an active volcano, with Karin, a beautiful stranger, the target of the village’s bigotry and castigation. Isolated and despairing, she undergoes something of a spiritual crisis. Rossellini explores ideas of belonging and estrangement perhaps well-suited to the actor at that time; but he offers no easy answers.

Journey to Italy (1954)
Director Roberto Rossellini


Journey to Italy (1954)

Rossellini’s enigmatic story of an unravelling marriage takes place in the coastal holiday destination known as the Neapolitan Riviera. It’s a place so breathtakingly beautiful that one wonders how even the most sniffy of bourgeois couples might be unhappy there, but Alex (George Sanders) and Katherine (Bergman), a vacationing English couple, seem to fit the bill. Something in the Italian mood seems to magnify their malaise, making them aware of their loss of vitality after eight years of marriage. Conversations are airless and sarcastic. They make trips in solitude, wandering art museums and nightclubs with a distinct lack of purpose. When the pair finally come together in a tender moment, one wonders how much of it is motivated by devotion, and how much it’s just plain terror of their own mortality.

Anastasia (1956)
Director Anatole Litvak


Anastasia (1956)

It’s somehow fitting that Bergman’s return to Hollywood after years of exile was in a film about the reinstatement of a deposed princess to her rightful place. (Even more fitting that she should win an Academy Award for her efforts.) Yet home isn’t home anymore for the Grand Duchess Anastasia, who, perhaps like the star, has been irrevocably changed by her exile; a gilded cage has no real attraction for her. Yul Brynner is an ex-general who has his eye on the inheritance left for any surviving member of the Romanov family. Bergman is the amnesiac princess – a starving vagrant when Brynner discovers her. It’s a histrionic, larger-than-life role set off by lavish CinemaScope, but Bergman does well to ground it – and to make real the terrible trauma of her family’s execution.

Indiscreet (1958)
Director Stanley Donen


Indiscreet (1958)

This British reunion for Cary Grant and his Notorious co-star allowed them to resume their amiable working relationship, and the pair’s chemistry was still palpable. Donen elevates run-of-the-mill material here, casting Bergman as a lovelorn woman and Grant as the married man she falls for. It’s breezily directed, effortlessly acted, and full of effervescent glamour – the Lanvin, Dior, and Balmain gowns designed for Ingrid are alone worth the price of admission. Playfully acknowledging Bergman’s real-life reputation, the film posits her character as a potential homewrecker before conveniently dispensing with the moral quandary – Grant’s in a sham marriage. Still, it leaves her with a wickedly memorable line: “How dare he make love to me and not be a married man!”

Autumn Sonata (1978)
Director Ingmar Bergman


Autumn Sonata (1978)

Ingmar Bergman’s softly-lit chamber piece stars Liv Ullmann as Eva, the resentful grown daughter to Ingrid’s elegant concert pianist, Charlotte. The film picks up after a seven-year gap between visits. In that space of time, Eva has lost a child who her mother has never even bothered to meet. Over the course of a day and a cathartic night, the facade of affection between the two women slips into blame and painful recrimination. The Swedish master takes a scalpel to the fraught mother-daughter dynamic, offering an unrelenting gaze into the bitter cycle of guilt, codependence and rage therein. Accusals of infidelity and family abandonment can’t help but to recall the star’s own extramarital drama, making it a brave and astoundingly frank late-career performance from Bergman.
 

Barbara Fan

Admin
LV
12
 
Messages
10,202
Reaction score
23,156
Awards
28
Location
Scotland
Member Since
2000
Favourite Movie
Witness, Vertigo, Spellbound
Lovely Ingrid Bergman interview from 1981 with Frank Bough on BBC1

 

Barbara Fan

Admin
LV
12
 
Messages
10,202
Reaction score
23,156
Awards
28
Location
Scotland
Member Since
2000
Favourite Movie
Witness, Vertigo, Spellbound
I have always wanted to see this

behind the scenes filming of Autumn Sonata - Ingrid and Ingmar

I just wish that I was Swedish lol @Karin Schill

 
K

Karin Schill

Guest
Too bad they don't have closed captions with translation to English. :(
I saw one feature about this movie that was on the DVD a few years ago. I don't think it was this one however. But what I remember from it was that Ingrid had come into the movie with a very clear vision of how she wanted to do the part and Ingmar had looked at the way she played it and was all like "Oh no she's doing it all wrong" and then he had to break down her performance bit by bit and change everything until he got it the way he wanted it. :lol:
 

Barbara Fan

Admin
LV
12
 
Messages
10,202
Reaction score
23,156
Awards
28
Location
Scotland
Member Since
2000
Favourite Movie
Witness, Vertigo, Spellbound
Happy New Year to all Ingrid Bergman fans and excited that I may get to see some IB places later this year









Love BF x
 

Barbara Fan

Admin
LV
12
 
Messages
10,202
Reaction score
23,156
Awards
28
Location
Scotland
Member Since
2000
Favourite Movie
Witness, Vertigo, Spellbound
Andy Warhol does Ingrid Bergman

i have a copy of 2 prints









love BF x
 

Barbara Fan

Admin
LV
12
 
Messages
10,202
Reaction score
23,156
Awards
28
Location
Scotland
Member Since
2000
Favourite Movie
Witness, Vertigo, Spellbound
nice interview http://ingridandisabella.tripod.com/ing_artatodd.html

Ann Todd on her friend Ingrid
Reader's Digest Feb. 1984
Unforgettable Ingrid Bergman
One of the world's most beautiful and talented film stars, she treated life as a merry-go-round. But when the music stopped she reacted with heartbreaking gallantry

By Ann Todd

When she appeared on the screen without makeup, cosmetic sales in the United States declined. When she played a nun, convent enrollments increased. Industrialist Howard Hughes once bought every available airplane seat from New York to Los Angeles to be sure she would accept a ride in his private plane. A fan walked a sheep all the way from Sweden to Rome as a gift for her. Letters were addressed simply "Ingrid Bergman London."

None of that is my Ingrid. My Ingrid is wandering London streets in galoshes and an old raincoat with that big stride of hers; bounding upstairs to my flat, balancing a pot of homecooked Swedish meatballs for our dinner; curling up barefoot in front of the television set and laughing and laughing and laughing.

I first heard Ingrid's magical laughter 34 years ago over scrambled eggs in a restaurant in Rome, where we had got together simply as two English-speaking actresses working in a foreign city. For me it was a case of love at first sound. Her fair hair thrown back, and those cloudless blue eyes sparkling, the low voice that could sound so masculine on the telephone that operators (to her great annoyance) sometimes answered, "Yes, sir!" During our first exuberant day together, each of us felt as if she had discovered a long lost sister and we never looked back.

Later, I remember, we attended a mass celebrated by the pope at a wooded shrine near Rome. When Ingrid became aware that the fervently praying young girl next to her was blind, she knelt beside her and quietly described in Italian every detail of the service. That warm beam of generosity she shone into the world was a very precious talent.

One of the most glamorous women of our time, Ingrid was never anything but her supremely simple self: a stage-struck life-struck girl, who loved to gobble ice cream and walk in the rain. She wanted to play every part, take every trip, give every party, drink every glass of champagne that life could offer. "I never regretted any thing I did," she once said "just the things I didn't do."

That must've been a very short list. Ingrid lived successfully in some of the world's most interesting cities Stockholm, Hollywood, Rome, Paris, and London and played starring roles on stage, screen and television in five languages. She made 47 films and won three Oscars and two Emmys. She was the devoted mother of four children Pia with her first husband, Petter Lindstrom; Roberto, and twins, Isabella and Ingrid, with her second husband, Roberto Rossellini. Her autobiography was a best-seller.

She had a ferocious dedication to her work. "If you took acting away from me," she once claimed, "I'd stop breathing." When Ernest Hemingway told her she would have to cut off her hair for the role of Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls, she shot back, "To get that part, I'd cut my head off!" She would rehearse tirelessly until any hour of the night, begging to repeat a scene long after the director was satisfied. Once she even proposed that she live on the set until the filming was over. The night before the end of an eight-month run of The Constant Wife in a London theater, she was still eagerly discussing with the director, John Gielgud, ways of improving her performance.

At the peak of her stardom, Ingrid insisted on taking screen tests and refused leads in favor of lesser but more challenging parts. Unwilling to be type-cast, she fought for roles like the young bride on the edge of madness in Gaslight and the mousy Swedish missionary in Murder on the Orient Express (both brought her Academy Awards).

Understudying Ingrid was guaranteed unemployment. She broke her foot at the beginning of the American run of The Constant Wife and played the next five weeks in a wheelchair. No matter how ill she might be, she would say with a grin, "Dr. Stage will cure me" --- and there she always was when the curtain rose.

From her earliest childhood in Stockholm, Ingrid never had a moment's doubt about where she was going. At 14 she scribbled in her diary her dreams of starring in a movie opposite Sweden's leading matinee idol and five years later she was doing just that. "I was the shyest human ever invented," she said. "But I had a lion inside me that wouldn't shut up."

Her luck was as phenomenal as her talent. In New York City, a Swedish couple praised a film of hers to their son, an elevator operator in the apartment building where one of film producer David Selznick's young talent scouts lived. Six months later, Ingrid was on her way to Hollywood. "I owe my whole career to that elevator boy," she would say laughingly.

When Selznick told his prospective new 23-year-old star that they would have to change her name, cap her teeth and pluck her eyebrows, Ingrid threatened to return to Sweden. And so the famous "natural" look was born. The critics dubbed her "the Palmolive Garbo."

One beguiling role followed another: the lonely piano teacher in Intermezzo; the passionate psychiatrist in Spellbound; the baseball playing nun in The Bells of St. Mary's. Within a few years, she was one of America's most popular film stars and a top draw at the world's box office.

Then, one night in 1948, Ingrid went to see Open City, a realistic movie of wartime Rome produced and directed by Roberto Rossellini. Drawn to Rossellini's stormy genius "I think I fell in love with Roberto the moment I saw the film," Ingrid confided to me later she impulsively wrote and offered to make a movie with him.

Ingrid flew to Rome and stayed for seven years. Still married to Petter Lindstrom, she bore Rossellini a child, causing public outrage. A hostile press called it the "scandal of the century." And Ingrid was reviled on the floor of the U.S. Senate as unworthy to "set foot on American soil again."

Transformed overnight into box-office poison, Ingrid found her Hollywood career in ruins. The films she made with Rossellini were largely failures and so, in the end was their marriage.

In 1956 the clouds finally broke when Ingrid played the fictional surviving daughter of the last Czar of Russia in Anastasia. Her enthralling performance won her an Oscar. Subsequently, Sen. Charles H. Percy read into the Congressional Record a nation's apologetic tribute to her: "One of the world's loveliest, most talented women was made the victim of a bitter attack in this chamber twenty-two years ago. To the American public she will always hold a place in our hearts as one of the greatest performing artists of our time. Miss Bergman is not only welcome in America, we are deeply honored by her visits here."

Ingrid's performances, like her life, seemed to flow with utter candor from her innermost nature. "When she went onstage", her one-time costar Joss Ackland said, "it was as natural as a housewife walking into her kitchen."

Producer Sidney Bernstein described her as the most sophisticated peasant he'd ever met. Indeed, like many Swedes, she positively relished housework. I remember a time when I arrived at Ingrid's house outside Paris for what I imagined would be a relaxing weekend in the country. Ingrid announced she had a surprise for me: she had sent her staff of two away for a short holiday, so that she and I could have the fun of cleaning the house from top to bottom. And she distributed mop and pail like a contented drill sergeant. I don't think we were ever closer than we were those few days while we swabbed the floors and gabbled about our children.

Ingrid always had a project, whether it was dashing into my Suffolk village by the sea to buy an emergency bottle of champagne or bicycling in Hyde Park in London with me on a Sunday morning or flying to Tokyo to see a new hit stage version of Gone With the Wind. Everything was an excuse for a party. Ingrid wanted life to be one long merry-go-round ride.

But she also concerned herself with serious matters. In 1958, Ingrid had made a film called The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, the story of a British missionary who rescued hundreds of Chinese children during World War II and founded an orphanage in Formosa. Some years later, Ingrid made a trip to the orphanage. Moved by the plight of the children, she poured lavish doses of that Bergman energy into raising funds in Europe and America for the orphanage. She then became fervently active in the Ockenden Venture, a British organization caring for refugee children. Joyce Pearce, its founder, once told me, "No matter where in the world Ingrid was or how busy we always knew we could count on her."

Not even the cancer that struck Ingrid in 1973 could stifle her spirit or sap her energy. As long as there were some good times to be had or some work to be done, she faced each day with heartbreaking gallantry.

For a long time, even those of us who were close to her had no idea how sick she really was. "When we were working, she wanted us to share only her joys," Wendy Hiller recalled, "never her misery." She underwent two mastectomies. Her right arm swelled grotesquely. "My pet dragon," she called it with cheerful courage.

Against all odds, she was determined to take on the role of the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in a grueling four-hour television biography. "Time is shortening,' She admitted. "But every day that I challenge this cancer and survive is a victory for me."

Ingrid barged into the project with all her old energy. She traveled around Israel and interviewed those who had known Golda Meir intimately. She spent hours studying old newsreels to master Golda's mannerisms. I can still see tall, elegant Ingrid practicing her new prime-minister walk up and down my kitchen until she was transformed into squat, scrappy Golda.

During the filming, Ingrid was in constant pain from her arm, which had to be put up in torturous traction every night. When the long, final close-up came around, a tearful Ingrid knew it was the last time she would face her beloved camera. Her stunning portrayal won her a 1982 Emmy.

Ingrid never once relinquished the dignity of hope. Only days before her death, she was considering new parts. She gave me a last present of a ticket to the Edinburgh International Festival and, I wept to discover, had arranged a place for herself as well though we both knew it was a trip she would never make. When I spoke to her one night, she said, "Oh, I am so tired. I just want to sleep." On another occasion shortly before her death, I told Ingrid, "It is a great gift you have to bring out love.greater than loving." Laughing, she shook her head. But to me this was the true essence of her magic.

She died on August 29, 1982, her 67th birthday but not before she had one last sip of champagne.

For many film-goers Ingrid will always be alive with Gary Cooper in the snowy Spanish mountains or with Cary Grant in spy-filled Rio. But perhaps the role that most vividly conjures up her haunting face is that of Ilsa Lund in Casablanca. There, forever, is Ingrid standing by the piano, murmuring, "Sam, play it once for old time's sake"; smiling wistfully at Humphrey Bogart's toast "Here's looking at you, kid"; making her anguished farewell on that foggy airfield.
 

Barbara Fan

Admin
LV
12
 
Messages
10,202
Reaction score
23,156
Awards
28
Location
Scotland
Member Since
2000
Favourite Movie
Witness, Vertigo, Spellbound
I can never thank @Karin Schill and her sister Jenny enough for taking me to Solna to see the resting place of Ingrid Bergmans parents and aunt and to see where some of her ashes were scattered.

It was very special and there arent enough words to Thank you, it meant so much to me

love BF xx



 
K

Karin Schill

Guest
You're welcome @Barbara Fan It was great fun to see you again and we are glad that it meant so much to you. :pals:
Also having visited Elizabeth Taylor's final resting place on my first visit to LA I think I can understand how you feel. I know how important it is to visit places like that to show respect to our idols and to get a sense of closure.

We were also happy to show you this place:

Våren2019 065_small.jpg


For those of you who doesn't know what it is, this is the old Swedish film studio in Råsunda where Ingrid Bergman was discovered and got her start in films. :)
 

Barbara Fan

Admin
LV
12
 
Messages
10,202
Reaction score
23,156
Awards
28
Location
Scotland
Member Since
2000
Favourite Movie
Witness, Vertigo, Spellbound
I have to say that I loved Stockholm, would recommend it as a City break for 3 or 4 nights. Its easy to get to and from the city from Arlanda airport and only 2o mins on fast train (but pricey)

The hop on and off bus and boat is great and a wonderful way to orientate yourself to the city and it makes it easier to get to places

The views from the Strandvagan are great, the Vasa museum really intersting and the Abba museum was fab, what fun and very inter active

I also had great tourist guides lol Thanks @Karin Schill and Jenny - i couldnt have asked for a more wonderful day.

Im sure i will return!!!!!!!!! And Ingrid Sight seeing was the icing on the cake and a cherry on top

BF xxxxx
 
Top