The Price of Redemption

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

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 informed 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 teenager, 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 in 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 a 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 Lana 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 Gary 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 cast 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 sickbed 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

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