Hollywood Years
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(The Complete Films) When Intermezzo and En Kvinnas Ansikte were shown in America and Hollywood began to take an interest in Ingrid, David O. Selznick, alerted by his New York representative, Kay Brown, to Ms Bergman's singular appeal, dispatched Ms Brown to the Lindstroms in Stockholm with the offer of a contract.
Ms Bergman and Lindstrom listened courteously to Ms Brown, but they were hesitant.
Lindstrom had his medical studies to complete and Ms Bergman felt that Pia was too young to travel.
But she had cut her teeth abroad in one German film and Hollywood represented a challenge that she did not want to forego.
Eventually she and Lindstrom decided against the seven year contract because they were not sure they wanted to leave Stockholm permanently. She did accept a one picture deal with the proviso that if she did not register with American audiences, she would be free to return home.
To give her added assurance, in the face of the necessity of learning Englsih, and braving faroff Hollywood, Selznick offered to let her do a remake of Intermezzo. She arrived in New York in May 1939. Ms Brown escorted her on to Hollywood, where the Selznicks took her into their home as a house guest. Selznick later said,
"The minute I looked at her, I knew I had something. She had an extarordinary quality of purity and nobility and a definite star personality that is very rare. But she acted like a movie struck teen ager. I remember having a party for her at my home. Spencer Tracy, Charles Boyer and a dozen other movie stars were there. She just sat in a corner staring at them in awe. She was too shy she couldn't stop blushing."
Selznick inaugurated a first class buildup for her. Intermezzo, a Love Story as it was titled was produced with painstaking care, with Leslie Howard in the Gosta Ekman role, and Gregory Ratoff directing. When Howard discovered that Ms Bergman had learned every piano note in the concerto she was to play in the film, he followed a similar program with his violin. Years later, Ms Bergman recalled with amusement that Ratoff was forever correcting her English though his own accent was usually incomprehesible.
Ruth Roberts, an MGM English coach who had helped Hedy Lamarr and others, was assigned to tutor Miss Bergman in her lines, and though she was of Swedish descent and spoke the language fluently, Ruth Roberts did not let Ms Bergman in on it until much later. "You wold have been tempted to lapse into Swedish at every opportunity and my job was to teach you English," she said. Away from the studio, Ms Bergman worked hard with Mrs. Roberts, and with her natural flair for languages, conquered English speedily.
Intermezzo, a Love Story was released some months later, and proved an enormous success. Most of the American film critics hailed Ms Bergman's naturalness, poise, intelligence and uniquely sensitive aura. Selznick, his premonition that she would become a top Hollywood star confirmed, urged her to stay on. She told him of her long standing ambition to play Joan of Arc and he agreed that it was a likely screen subject for her.
She returned to Sweden in the late summer of 1939. "I loved working in Hollywood," she said later, and I liked the people I worked with. I wanted so much to come back but I had to think of my baby and Petter's studies. It all seemed complicated."
World War II then broke out in Europe, and Lindstrom, concerned for the safety of his family and fearful that Sweden might get involved in the war, urged her to return to America. She arrived in New York with Pia early in 1940, via steamship from Genoa. The hugely self assured and ever efficient Kay Brown took her in tow, and she looked forward with happy anticipation to the Joan of Arc film. David Selznick who had meanwhile picked up her option had promised her that this would be her next picture. Later Selznick saw fit to change his mind giving as his reason that, with the war on, the historical persecution of Joan by the English would not go down well with Americans. A second disappointment came when Selznick informed her through Kay Brown that he had no immediate picture for her.
 Ms Bergman lingered on in New York, saw all the movies and plays, and grew increasingly restless in the face of continuing inactivity. She pleaded with Selznick to let her do a Broadway play, and finally he agreed. Kay Brown let it be known along the Rialto that Ms Bergman was available, and Vinton Freedly offered her the co-starring role of Julie in Liliom. She opened in it in 1940 and was an instant success, with the critics praising her unaffected simplicity and warmth and her polished technique.
Later in the year came Adam Had Four Sons where she played a lovable and loyal family governess, and Rage in Heaven, in which she played the long-suffering young wife of psychotic Robert Montgomery.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde brought about her first professional contact with director Victor Fleming, the leonine, masterful man who had guided Gone With the Wind. Seven years later he would direct her in the filming of the long deferred Joan of Arc. Fleming called her Angel and she told friends that he had given her enormous creative inspiration.
Dr Lindstrom soon joined his wife and child in America. He resumed his medical studies, this time at the University of Rochester. Ms Bergman, he and Pia found a house in that upstate New York community, and she tried to adjust herself to the amenities of domestic life.
Eventually worn down by her demands, Selznick staged a production of Anna Christie at Santa Barbara's Lobero Theatre and put Ms. Bergman into the title role. The play opened in August 1940. While she gave a technically expert performance, some critics declred that she seemed too much the good woman to successfully approximate the jaded bitterness and despair of the ex-prostitute Anna Christie who tries to find a haven with her father and a second chance at love.
Ingrid remained in Rochester briefly before she and Pia went back to Hollywood. She resumed her English studies with Ruth Roberts, kept track of most of the movies being released, sometimes looking at four or five in a day, and when Paramount in 1942 purchased the screen rights to Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, she read the book and pressured Selznick to help her get the role. Selznick agreed that the part was good and he in turn pressured Paramount. But the studio had other ideas, and told him that Ingrid did not fit their conception of the war weary, spirit wounded Maria. Other actresses were under consideration, including Olivia de Haviland and Joan Fontaine. Finally, Paramount decided on Vera Zorina who had had a brief prior film career but was better known as a ballerina. This though Sleznick had asked Hemingway to endorse Ms Bergman for the role and the author and the actress had been photographed together with Hemingway according his well publicized blessing.
Deeply disappointed, she continued her search for the right story. Selznick equally alert at this time, persuaded her to work for Warners for Casablanca opposite Humphrey Bogart. As Ilsa, torn between her love for the adventurous cabaret owner, Rick, and loyalty to her underground leader husband, Ms. Bergman registered as so warm, radiant and cinematically exciting that the critics went all out. The film itself was one of the biggest critical and popular hits of its year.
Another lucky break then came her way. Soon after shooting began on For Whom the Bell Tolls, Paramount decided that Vera Zorina was not right for Maria after all, and Ms Bergman was handed the role she had coveted. When the picture came out in the summer of 1943 there were mixed critical reactions to her work. Some of it commenting on her essential unsuitability for the part of the life battered Spanish girl who has a brief romance with Gary Cooper's idealistic Robert Jordan, fighter for the loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War. The picture, however, garnered a great deal of public attention and despite the flaws that some critics discerned in her screen image in this part, her acting won her an Academy Award nomination, just as Sezlnick had predicted it would.
In 1943 she began work on Gaslight opposite Charles Boyer. As the fear maddened wife whose scheming husband deliberately tries to drive her insane, Ingrid projected much emotional power and interpretive mesmerism and won the 1944 Academy Award.
She was then seen in three pictures, released close together in the 1945-1946 season, whose cumulative impact metamorphosed her into one of Hollywood's superstars. These were Spellbound, the last of her films to be personally produced by Selzinick, The Bells of St Mary's, in which she played a nun opposite Bing Crosby's priest in a sequel of Going My Way (she had hounded Selznick persistently to let her play it), and Saratoga Trunk.
The last picture due under her old Selznick contract was Notorious in which she was teamed with Cary Grant. It was directed by Alfred Hitchock for RKO and released in the fall of 1946.
She had meanwhile achieved a signal stage triumph in Joan of Lorraine which opened on Broadway in the fall of 1946. The critics paid tribute to her radiance and authority and essential rightness in the part. Impulsively she told friends that she was through with films and that the stage would henceforth be her life. But a few months later she was restless again and back in Hollywood.
Her next project was the film verion of Joan of Arc, and she was finally able to play her childhood heroine on film.
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Films
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Rosa Ingrid Bergman (gardening.mweb.co.za) - Rose named after Ingrid Bergman.
Evergreen/Deciduous: Evergreen
Plant Type: Rose
Flower Colour: Velvet red
Foliage Colour: Green
Best Season: Summer to Autumn
Light : Sun
Attributes: Cut Flower
Height (m): 1.5
Hybrid tea rose. Only a very special rose could honour Ingrid Bergman, and being a red rose, it had to excel. It is most fitting that this rose was raised in Scandinavia by the rose breeding firm of Poulsens Roses which has a century of traditions and experience. "Poulsen" roses are famous for their vigour and general toughness and Ingrid Bergman is no exception. 35 broad and firm petals make up the large, glowing, velvet red blooms which hold their brilliancy in the sun as no other crimson hybrid tea does.
The bushes grow into well branched specimen plants clothed with glossy, deep green leaves which remain untouched by mildew or black spot. New, bronze red shoots appear until deep into Winter, producing their shapely blooms in an abundance comparable to a grandiflora rose.
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