She was born in Stockholm 10 years after Greta Garbo. Both lost their fathers when they were in their early teens, but Bergman had a theatrical training her fellow Swede was denied. She came to international stardom in the early 1940s, when Garbo left Hollywood to live a reclusive life. Garbo had a luminous, androgynous beauty. Bergman had a fresh-faced, open-air radiance. Garbo's career was a brief European prologue, 15 years of MGM productions, and a 48-year, teasing retirement. Bergman's career unfolded in four chapters of energetic professional activity, from her mid-teens to her death.
In the first chapter she became a local star. The second chapter began with her being signed up by Hollywood tycoon David O Selznick, who brought her to the States for a remake of her big Swedish success, Intermezzo (1939). Over the next decade she played opposite Bogart, Tracy, Cooper, Boyer, Crosby, Peck and Grant, always the exotic, erotic, vulnerable foreigner, most famously now as Ilsa Lund in the greatest patriotic melodrama of the Second World War, about the transcendent demands of social duty and moral responsibility, Casablanca (1942). The third chapter began when, tired of Tinseltown, she took up professionally and personally with neo-realist Roberto Rossellini, becoming one of Hollywood's pariahs of the McCarthy era, seen as a prime example of Swedish moral laxity. They made several distinguished films, most notably the chilly tale of marital breakdown Voyage to Italy (1954), before they split up. The concluding chapter began with her return to the fold via Jean Renoir's delightful Elena et les hommes (1956), and Anatole Litvak's heavy-handed Anastasia (1956), for which she won her second Oscar. Though embraced by Hollywood, she worked mostly in Europe, increasingly in character roles like the lady's companion in Murder on the Orient Express (1974). The great role of these last years was in Autumn Sonata (1978), her only collaboration with Ingmar Bergman.
Her advice to actress daughter Isabella Rossellini 'Keep it simple. Make a blank face and the music and the story will fill in.'
On stereotyping (1) 'Because I am a Swede I always suffer in films. Look at The Bells of St Mary's. I was happy and gay, but there had to be something wrong. So they gave me TB.'
On stereotyping (2) 'I always wanted to do comedies but nobody discovered this until my old age. They think all Swedes are like Garbo.'
Essential DVDs Casablanca, Gaslight, Spellbound, Notorious, Voyage to Italy, Autumn Sonata.
