Renaissance
(The Complete Films) In 1955 Kay Brown arrived from America with a 20th Centrury Fox offer of the title role in their forthcoming production Anastasia, about the Czar's daughter who supposedly had escaped the 1918 mass murder of the Russian Imperial Family.
Anastasia proved highly successful and won Ms Bergman her second Academy Award.
Bounine, a White Russian general, and his fellow schemers who are with him in exile in the 1920s, encounter an unknown woman, who has been found wandering half-mad, physically depleted, and suffering from amnesia. She bears a strong resemblance to the Grand Duchess Anastasia, daughter of Nicholas II, last Czar of Russia, who was presumably murdered with the rest of the Imperial Family in 1918. There have been rumors between 1918 and 1926 throughout Europe to the effect that Anastasia was the only one of the family to survive the mass shooting in the cellar at Ekaterinburg. Bounine and his friends decide to groom and train The Unknown and try to pass her off as Anastasia. If successful, they hope to share in the fortune which would be hers if rumors that Nicholas II had deposited large funds outside Russia should prove correct.
Bounine coaches The Unknown relentlessly in matters of Imperial etiquette. He drills her in a host of details and facts relating to Anastasia. The hitherto listless and vague girl begins to come to life and to assume a distinctive personality. Bounine confronts her with former members of the Imperial court, and when she shows surprising flashes of knowledge and insight into the life of the original Anastasia, Bounine is surprised. A skeptical old court chamberlain of the Romanov court at first turns from the claimant in scorn when Bounine forces a meeting; then even he is converted when The Unknown suddenly assumes an aura that only a person of the highest station could project authentically. More and more the true personality of The Unknown emerges, and she recalls facts about her former life that only the Grand Duchess could have known. Bounine is driven to wonder if he does not, after all, have the authentic article on his hands. But a final test is necessary - and it is one that "Anastasia" must pass.
Bounine takes her to Copenhagen to meet the Dowager Empress Marie, her grandmother, who after many disappointments at the hands of claimants and pretenders, refuses to see her. Through the good offices of Prince Paul and the Baroness Von Livenbaum the claimant, whom the Empress has covertly observed from a distance at the theatre, finally gains access to the Presence. When she reveals personal traits (a cough that she develops when excited) that only her grandmother could recognize, the old Empress joyfully accepts her as the authentic Grand Duchess Anastasia and takes her into her home.
Boumine has gradually fallen in love with Anastasia, as he admits to the Empress, but his crude, taciturn personality makes it difficult for him to confess his feelings. Anastasia has become engaged to Prince Paul, but when the Empress asks Anastasia if she loves Paul, she replies that she does not. She has herself fallen in love with Bounine, and the Empress aware now of their mutual feeling, so arranges it that when faced with a life of exalted but lonely station or happiness with Bounine, Anastasia is permitted to choose the latter.
In 1957 came Tea and Sympathy and Paris Does Strange Things, and a year later Indiscreet, a delightful comedy with Cary Grant, and The Inn of Sixth Happiness in which she played an Englishwoman who becomes a missionary in China.
The 1960s brought Goodbye Again, and The Visit, the screen version of the Friedrich Duerrenmatt play about a wealthy woman, who returned to a mid-European village seeking revenge on a man who had betrayed her years before, co-starred Ms Bergman and Anthony Quinn. In the Yellow Rolls Royce, a three episode film released by MGM n 1965 she starred in Episode III with Omar Sharif and portrayed a wealthy woman who helps a Yugoslav partisan to fight the Nazis in 1941.
She did another episode segment in Stimulantia, her first Swedish film in twenty five years. It was directed in 1964 by her old mentor Gustaf Molander and co-starred her with her old schoolmate at the Royal Dramatic Theatre School, Gunnar Bjornstrand, in a segment based on DeMaupassant's "The Necklace." The story concerned a couple who spend years paying for a necklace borrowed by the wife and lost, only to discover it was worthless paste. This film played in Sweden in 1967.
On television she has been seen in The Turn of the Screw (1959), Hedda Gabler (1963), and The Human Voice (1967). She did Ibsen's Hedda Gabler on the Paris stage in 1962; Turgenev's A Month in the Country in England in 1965, and Eugene O'Neill's More Stately Mansions in 1967.
The verdict on her stage and TV versions of Hedda Gabler seems to have been that she was obviously too beneficent spirited a person to do full justice to Ibsen's vindictive heroine.
She got good notices as the love obsessed and lonely Natalia in A Month in the Country in London after a hesitant out of town summer engagement at Guildford, and her beauty and charm were praised in her role of the domineering matriach in More Stately Mansions; in 1974 for an extremely small role as a drab neurotic Swedish missionary in the film version of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express which won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
She returned to Sweden to make her final film, Autumn Sonata (1978), in which she teamed for the first time with director Ingmar Bergman. She won critical acclaim as a self-centered concert pianist trying to reconcile in later life with a married daughter whom she has long neglected.
The role garnered her final Academy Award nomination. She died on the day of her birthday August 29th. She spoke of acting her lifelong love from since her childhood thus, "I have always thought that I will go on acting and acting and acting because I belong to these people of the theatre and the movies and the make believe world we create. I know the opening nights are agony but even that binds us together like a family. Every evening we go out there on the stage and share our beautiful world.
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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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