Notorious Life Ingrid Bergman

Revealing and richly informative account of the dramatic life of one of the century’s most famous screen actresses, Ingrid Bergman (1915–82), a controversial woman whose affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini led to her being banned from the USA for seven years.

Ingrid Bergman was the daughter of a Swedish father and German mother, who spent part of the 1930s in the German film industry. Her success in the Swedish film ‘Intermezzo’ (1936), where she played a concert pianist, led to her arrival in Hollywood in 1939, where she starred in ‘Casablanca’, three of Hitchcock’s films (‘Notorious’, ‘Spellbound’ and ‘Under Capricorn’), ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ (with Spencer Tracy), ‘Gaslight’, ‘The Bells of St Mary’s’, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, etc.

Her roles, like her life, alternated between the saintly and the saucy, the innocent and the dissolute. At first America fell in love with her: she was uncommonly fresh, recognisably human, and (it seemed) a happily domesticated wife and mother. However, as Spoto shows, nothing was ever tame about Ingrid; her love affairs were intense, and her relationship with Rossellini scandalised America.

Ingrid Bergman’s work and life comprise a romantic drama that rivals the biographies of Isadora Duncan, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and Jacqueline Kennedy. In forty-nine feature films, nine plays and countless public appearances, she enchanted millions over a period of five decades.