Ingrid Bergman Biography

Ingrid Bergman ▶ (help·info) (August 29, 1915 – August 29, 1982) was an Academy Award-winning Swedish actress.

Bergman was born in Stockholm, Sweden to Lutheran parents. When still very young, she lost both of her parents and was raised by relatives; she studied at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm and had a small role in The Count of the Old Town (1935), her first movie. After a dozen films in Sweden, Bergman was signed by David O. Selznick to star in the English language remake of her earlier 1936 Swedish language film, Intermezzo (1939). The film was an enormous success and "Sweden's illustrious gift to Hollywood" had arrived.
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After completing a few pictures in Sweden and appearing in three successful films in the United States, Bergman joined Humphrey Bogart in the 1942 classic film Casablanca. Two years later she received her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for the film, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943). The following year she won Best Actress for Gaslight (1944). She received a third consecutive nomination for Best Actress with her performance in The Bells of St. Mary's (1945). She would receive another Best Actress nomination for Joan of Arc (1948). Alfred Hitchcock, who directed her in Notorious, Spellbound and Under Capricorn, was known to be obsessed with her.

In 1949 Bergman met director Roberto Rossellini. She fell in love with him while performing in his film Stromboli (1950). Bergman left both her husband, Dr. Aron Petter Lindström and their daughter Pia Lindström for Rossellini, and they married and had 3 children, including twin daughters actresses Isabella Rossellini, Isotta Rossellini, and a son, Roberto Ingmar Rossellini. The affair caused a scandal both in Hollywood and with the public; Bergman, who was pregnant at the time of the marriage, was branded as "Hollywood's apostle of degradation" and forced to leave the States.

With her starring role in 1956's Anastasia, Bergman made her post-scandal triumphant return to Hollywood and won Best Actress for a second time. She would continue to alternate between performances in American and European films. She received her third Academy Award (and first for Best Supporting Actress) for her performance in Murder on the Orient Express (1975), but she publicly declared at the Academy Awards telecast that year that the award rightfully belonged to Italian actress Valentina Cortese. In 1978 she played in Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata (also known as Höstsonaten) for which she received her seventh Academy Award nomination and made her final performance on the big screen. It is considered to be among her best performances.

She could speak Swedish, German, French, English and Italian fluently, which caused fellow actor John Gielgud's remark, "She speaks five languages, and can't act in any of them". Her final husband, Lars Schmidt, was a callow and much younger man, but Bergman accepted his dalliances with equanimity.

She died of complications from terminal breast cancer on her 67th birthday (which caused some to intimate that she had hastened her own end) in 1982 in London, England. She was cremated in Sweden, her ashes scattered with a part kept to be interred in the Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm.

Bergman was honored posthumously with an Emmy Award for Best Actress in 1982 for the television mini-series A Woman Called Golda, about the late Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. Her co-star in the mini-series was Leonard Nimoy.

For her contributions to the motion picture industry, Ingrid Bergman has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6759 Hollywood Blvd.

INGRID BERGMAN PICTURES

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INGRID BERGMAN BIOGRAPHY