correction
An obituary in Tuesday's editions of The Washington Post about actress Ingrid Bergman, 67, who died of cancer Sunday at her home in London, gave an incorrect date for her birth. She was born Aug. 29, 1915, in Stockholm, Sweden.
Ingrid Bergman, 67, an actress whose innocent yet provocative beauty made her one of the great stars of stage and screen and whose talents won her three Academy Awards and other high honors of her profession, died of cancer Sunday at her home in London.
Miss Bergman came to the United States from her native Sweden in 1938 to make "Intermezzo," which costarred Leslie Howard. The film immediately established her in the eyes of the critics and the hearts of the public. In the next 10 years, she made "Casablanca" (1942), which costarred Humphrey Bogart and became one of the best-loved films ever made; won her first Oscar, as the frightened wife of Charles Boyer in "Gaslight," which appeared in 1944, and became the most popular actress in the country at the box office. In 1946, she appeared on Broadway in Maxwell Anderson's "Joan of Lorraine," one of the great critical successes of that year.
Reviewing the play in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson said Miss Bergman had given "an exalting performance" and showed "gifts of extraordinary splendour." He added that she had endowed Joan "with a spiritual aura that is reflected in the audience as well as the play." Miss Bergman won the Antoinette Perry Award for that appearance.
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In 1948, she played in "Joan of Arc," the film version of the Anderson play.
It was in 1948 that she also went to Italy to make a film with Roberto Rossellini, whom she had admired as the producer of "Open City," a classic of post-World War II Italian neo-realism. Within weeks, Miss Bergman and Rossellini were lovers and Miss Bergman's career seemingly lay in ruins in this country.
For the worldy wise and yet unsullied former lover of Rick in "Casablanca;" the beautiful nun in "The Bells of St. Mary's" (1945), which also starred Bing Crosby; the adoring, dutiful and, yes, passionate adolescent who fell in love with Gary Cooper in the mountains of Spain in "For Whom the Bell Tolls;" and -- heavens preserve us -- the saintly and principled Maid of Orleans, had run off with an Italian movie director who was himself married at the time. She left behind not only a distraught and disbelieving public but also her husband and child.
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The problem, as Miss Bergman herself acknowledged, was that her fans could not reconcile her film image with her role as a woman.
So great was the outcry that theater owners forced RKO to cut the final scene in "Joan of Arc," in which the maid calls out to Jesus as she is burned at the stake. The theater owners contended that it was blasphemous for an adulteress to invoke the name of the Lord.
Sen. Edwin C. Johnson (D-Colo.) took to the floor of the Senate to denounce Miss Bergman as "a horrible example of womanhood and a powerful influence for evil." He noted that "under the law, no alien guilty of turpitude can set foot on American soil again." He said that the actress had "deliberately exiled herself from this country that was so good to her."
"It was absolute hell," Miss Bergman recalled. "I didn't think it would upset the whole world, but it did. I cried so much I thought there wouldn't be any tears left . . . I felt the newspapers were right. I was an awful woman, but I had not meant it that way. It was because so many people, who knew me only on the screen, thought I was perfect and infallible and then were angry and disappointed that I wasn't . . . A nun does not fall in love with an Italian."
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Until 1959, Miss Bergman stayed away from the United States and Hollywood. She made a number of films with Rossellini, the first of which was "Stromboli" (1950), which is the name of the island where they fell in love. Miss Bergman said she and Rossellini were "artistically bad for each other."
In time, the two drifted apart and were divorced. In time also, she made "Anastasia," a film in which she played the daughter of Czar Nicholas II of Russia who is said to have survived the massacre of the Romanov family in Ekaterinberg following the Bolshevik Revolution. The film appeared in 1956 and for it Miss Bergman received her second Academy Award for best actress of the year.
Still she would not return to Hollywood. She did not do so until 1959, when she helped present that year's Oscars. The ovation she received was an overwhelming tribute to her integrity and artistry. She had resumed her place in the firmament of film.
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"If a drop of sorrow remained, it vanished the night I first appeared on the Los Angeles stage and all Hollywood was there and the applause went on endlessly and I didn't know what to do," Miss Bergman said. "I walked up and down feeling embarrassed and grateful."
From then until the end of her life, Miss Bergman remained busy in the medium that had made her famous. Apart from such classics as "Casablanca" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls," her earlier career had included "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1941), in which she played the prostitute; "Spellbound" (1945), in which she appeared with Gregory Peck; "Saratoga Trunk" (1945), again with Gary Cooper; and "Notorious" (1946), which was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and in which Cary Grant was the costar.
After "Anastasia," she added "Paris Does Strange Things" (1958); "The Inn of the Sixth Happiness" (also 1958) and a Hitchcock thriller; "Goodbye Again" (1961); "The Yellow Rolls Royce" (1964), in which she played a cameo part; "A Walk in the Spring Rain" (1970), and in 1974, "Murder on the Orient Express," the Agatha Christie tale in which she all but stole the show from the likes of Albert Finney with a devastating and amusing performance as a Scandinavian maid tangentially involved in multiple murders.
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In 1979, she was nominated for an Academy Award for her role as the self-centered and vengeful pianist in "Autumn Sonata," which was directed by Ingmar Bergman.
Miss Bergman made numerous appearances on the stage in London and Paris. Her last film was "Golda," which was made for television and which was based on the life of Golda Meir, the school teacher from Milwaukee who became prime minister of Israel. At the time of Miss Bergman's death, the film, which was highly praised in this country, was being shown in Israel, where it received mixed reviews.
Ingrid Bergman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, on Aug. 29, 1917. Her parents were Justus and Friedel Adler Bergman. Her mother died when the child was 2. Her father, a photographer and painter, died when she was 11. As a child, Miss Bergman would retreat into fantasies in which she was the star.
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"Although I was shy, I had a lion roaring inside me that wouldn't sit down and shut up," she said years later. Reared by relatives after the death of her parents, she found solace in school plays and read dramatic poems to her classmates. In 1933, she was accepted in the School of the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm and spent two years there. She launched her film career in Sweden in 1935.
In addition to being extraordinarily beautiful, Miss Bergman was five feet eight inches tall. This is said to have made it difficult for her to make friends among contemporaries. One in whom she did confide was Petter Lindstrom, a dentist who became a brain surgeon. In 1937, they were married. They had one child, Pia.
This is the marriage that ended in Mexico after Miss Bergman met Rossellini, by whom she had a son, Roberto, and twin daughters, Isabella and Ingrid.
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In 1958, Miss Bergman married Lars Schmidt, a Swedish businessman. This marriage also ended in divorce.
Besides Swedish and English, Miss Bergman spoke French, German and Italian. She lived in London in recent years.
In 1974, she was diagnosed as having cancer and underwent the first of two mastectomies. She was last seen in public in May.
But neither time, nor illness, nor personal difficulty could dim her presence as an actress. When "Casablanca" appeared, one critic said she had the "rare ability to be demure and licentious at the same time." Her friend Ernest Hemingway once told her, "You are a great actress. Great actresses always have troubles." The British critic Clancy Sigal said she "represented an ideal womanhood, more attainable, more earthy than her compatriot [Greta] Garbo." And Howard Hughes said that although "she may not have been so terribly clever, shrewd or wise," she was "one of the most brilliant and courageous women of our generation."
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