by Grace Carter
As always, the arts remained at the core of Swedish culture, supported by the nation’s prosperous citizens. In such a fertile climate, Ingrid thrived, going to class six days a week and attending all the Royal Dramatic Theater shows for free, watching from an upper balcony. The 1933-34 season was rife with internationally diverse works - plays by acclaimed Swedish authors as well as America’s Eugene O’Neill, England’s John Drinkwater, France’s Jean Giraudoux, and Ireland’s George Bernard Shaw.
“We were not allowed in during rehearsals, but we got in just the same,” Ingrid recalled. “The ushers had the key to the top balcony, but we were just as clever with a hairpin. Of course, the directors down there knew what was going on - they’d done the same thing in their time - and occasionally they’d shout up, ‘Is there anyone up there?’ when we giggled too loudly at a laugh line.”
Ingrid spent her Sundays studying, either at the harbor at Strandvägen or at the Djurgården, a nearby park. There she honed her skills, practicing her diction and finding her rhythm by learning the best ways to sit, stand, and enter and exit a room. “And it was so very easy for me,” she recalled. “I had no difficulty in understanding what they meant when they explained how to handle your voice or move across a stage.” She took lessons in ballet, fencing, history of the theater, voice projection, posture, and also got to play scenes. She chose an understated approach to acting, and eschewed melodramatics; her moves were quiet and thoughtful, which only intensified her presence on the stage.
Most remarkably, Ingrid lost her shyness. Until then, she struggled with a mysterious nervous affliction that caused her fingers to swell up so she could not bend them. Her lips and eyelids swelled, too. No one knew what caused the swelling or how to cure it. But the moment she enrolled at drama school, all her ailments and nervousness disappeared.
“I changed for the better from one day to the next,” she recalled. “I became a terribly happy person, outgoing, relaxed, because I was doing exactly what I wanted to do.”
At Dramaten, she became widely respected by her teachers and her classmates, both for her natural talent and her resolute determination. Her fellow students remembered her as dependable, bright, energetic, and opinionated – the latter a trait some of them frowned upon. Classmate Ingrid Luterkort recalled Ingrid’s beauty and her self-confidence; it was obvious to all that Ingrid knew where she wanted to go and how she was going to get there.
After three months of classes, Ingrid got a big break – or so it seemed. Alf Sjöberg, the audition judge, passed Ingrid in the hallway just as he was beginning rehearsals for a new play, Sigfrid Siwertz’s A Crime. Struck by her look - open, innocent, beatific – he turned and stared. Then he rushed to the office of Olof Molander, Director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre.
“Olof, that new girl, the blond one, she suits the part in my play to perfection.”
“Alf, don’t be absurd,” Molander said. “She only joined in September. She’s an absolute beginner. You’ll have to take one of the girls who has been here the necessary two years.”
“But I want her. She’s got the right look, the right innocence. You can’t run a theater like the civil service. There must be exceptions to every rule that was ever made. Blame it on me. Say it’s all my fault.”
Molander hesitated, then finally said, “All right, have it your own way. But there’ll be trouble.”
Ingrid could not believe her luck. Thrilled, she showed up at rehearsals to work with big stars of the Swedish stage and screen like Inga Tidblad and Lars Hanson. “My heart was just bursting with excitement at working with them!” she recalled.
Then came the fallout. Girls who had spent years at the school waiting for their chance were livid at being passed over for this new girl. “They were spitting with rage,” Ingrid recalled. They attacked her physically. One kicked her; another hit her over the head; they accused her of granting sexual favors to get the part.
Molander met with Sjöberg and said, “I’m sorry, but she’s got to come out of your cast. Either she leaves the cast or there’ll be a house revolution. The older students simply won’t accept that a girl who’s only been here three months gets a big part in a play, the sort of part many of them have been waiting nearly five years to achieve.”
So Ingrid lost the part and was bitterly disappointed. But she got another chance the following spring when Sjöberg selected her and some other first-year students to appear as extras in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s classic comedy The Rivals. Ingrid was happy Sjöberg had chosen her but was nonetheless dismayed that she had no lines. Still, she was excited to share the stage - more or less - with Edvin Adolphson, a handsome actor with a reputation as a ladies’ man whose performances were known to make women swoon.
As it turns out, Adolphson, a forty-one-year-old husband and father, had been eyeing Ingrid since rehearsals began. Ingrid was equally attracted to Adolphson and flattered when he started showing her attention. Then, one day after rehearsals, he invited her and a co-worker out for coffee. A few days later, he asked Ingrid if she wanted to go for a walk; the route conveniently led to the apartment of a friend Adolphson knew was out of town.
Fully aware of what she was doing and knowing there was no chance of any future with Adolphson - other than to spend time with an experienced actor who shared her love of the theater - Ingrid consummated the relationship.
In her memoir, Ingrid does not mention her affair with Adolphson, perhaps because it overlapped with another relationship she was about to begin with the man who would become her first husband – Petter Aron Lindstrom.
Ingrid met Lindstrom through her cousin Margit, who one day asked if she would like to be part of a foursome having dinner at the Grand Hôtel that would include a charming young dentist, Petter Lindstrom.
At twenty-six, Lindstrom had already built a thriving practice and owned a car and a comfortable apartment. He was also handsome and tall - at six-foot-two, he was a full five inches taller than Ingrid - with blue eyes and fair hair. At twenty, Lindstrom had graduated from the University of Heidelberg with a degree in dentistry, then received a second degree in dental research at Leipzig University. In addition to his practice, he taught dentistry and studied medicine. On his days off, he skied, boxed, hiked, and swam.
“I can’t go, why ask me?” Ingrid told Margit. “I’ve nothing to wear. And the Grand Hotel . . . I’ve never been there in my life . . . I have never been out in a foursome . . . And a big restaurant where you dance and have supper? Oh, I don’t think so . . . oh, no, no!”
But inside, she was terribly excited. It didn’t take much to talk her into it. Off they went to the Grand Hôtel, and the three of them sat down in the restaurant until Lindstrom arrived. “Sorry I’m a bit late,” he said.
“No bother,” Margit said. “Now this is Ingrid. Ingrid . . . Petter Lindstrom.”
“I like your hair,” Lindstrom said as he sat down. (In fact, Ingrid said later, she looked like a schoolteacher with her hair brushed back from her forehead and held in a little knot at the back.)
“What a deep voice you have,” Petter added. “What a beautiful voice.”
She immediately felt better. They danced, had a lovely time, and the group took her home. A few days later, Lindstrom wanted the four of them to go out again. “I was very impressed with him,” Ingrid recalled. “At eighteen, anybody over twenty-five is so sophisticated, and I was going out with a man of the world, with his own car. Then we started to meet regularly. He called me up and invited me to lunch. Looking back, I’d say it was a slow friendship, which gradually turned into love.”
Otto and Hulda, who knew nothing of Ingrid’s dalliance with Adolphson, were happy to see their niece dating someone so successful and charming. Unlike Adolphson, Lindstrom was solid, steady, and dependable, and offered Ingrid a sense of security she had not known since her father died. He laughed a lot, sometimes played the buffoon, and had a great sense of fun.
By the summer of 1934, Ingrid was spending more and more
time with him - dinner and dancing on Saturday nights and Sunday picnics on the Swedish island of Djurgarden, where they enjoyed the historic area’s monuments, museums, and galleries and walked its beautiful trails.
As they got to know each other, Ingrid increasingly began to depend on Lindstrom, asking him questions about his views of life, trusting his judgment. Getting mixed up with an actress was never part of the methodical Lindstrom’s life plans, so it took him awhile to realize that he was smitten with her. “He fell in love almost without realizing what was happening,” Ingrid recalled.
Lindstrom had no idea that Ingrid was still seeing Adolphson on the side; he was busy with his studies and his work and content with the leisurely pace of their romance. But by the end of her first year of drama school, Ingrid was at a crossroads: She had to decide whether to join the other students for a tour of Russia to study theater or stay home to be with Lindstrom.
According to some accounts of her life, Adolphson knew about Lindstrom – and didn’t want her to leave for Russia – so he hired her to star as his love interest in a film comedy that he was directing called The Count of the Monk’s Bridge.
In her memoir, Ingrid tells a much different story about how she ended up in that film – her first-ever speaking role. “I really should have gone [to Russia] too,” she recalled. “But I had fallen in love with Petter Lindstrom. I didn’t want to stay away from him. So I stayed behind. But I was not working and Petter was. So what could I do all day? I had to do something.”
Ingrid went to see her Uncle Gunnar for help finding acting jobs since his flower shop was a popular destination for people in the film industry. One of his regular customers was Karin Swanström, a comedy actress who was now artistic director of the Svensk Filmindustri studio – the same place where Ingrid had worked her first acting job as an extra. Gunnar agreed to help and told Swanström how fond he was of Ingrid, whom he had known since she was born, explaining that her father had been his best friend, and now the poor child was an orphan. He reported back to Ingrid, “Karin was so moved that you can catch a tram out to Swedish Films tomorrow and she’ll see you.”
At their meeting, Ingrid read some poetry and Swanstrom was impressed enough to arrange a film test with famous Swedish filmmaker Gustav Molander, brother of Olof Molander. Gustav was not enthusiastic, but Swanstrom talked him into setting up a test for the next morning.
On her way to the studio, Ingrid began a routine that she would continue throughout her film career in Sweden. She got off the tram at the small graveyard where both her parents were buried and walked to a small bench under the birch tree near their graves. She sat down, bowed her head, and said a little prayer to her father, asking for help.
“Ingrid has never been totally reassured by the idea of God,” Alan Burgess, Ingrid’s coauthor, wrote in her memoir. “She has always had difficulty in reconciling the failure of God, surely dedicated to protecting the weak, the innocent, and the oppressed, to use His omnipotent power to diminish or end the brutal injustices in the world. But if she could not pray easily to God, she could to her father.”
Because her mother had died before Ingrid was old enough to confide in her, her conversations were always with her father. “I have a really difficult scene today, Papa,” she would tell him. “Make me calm. Give me confidence.”
Time and again, her prayers were answered; at the crucial screen test that she hoped would launch her film career, she was not nervous at all. “What do you want me to do?” she asked Molander. “Turn left, turn right, laugh . . . that’s easy. Say something. Do you want me to do it again? Can I see what you’ve done? Is it allowed? Tomorrow? Can I come tomorrow? Thank you very much.”
Though the test was not frightening, seeing the filmed result was. “That was a big shock,” she said. “You know what you look like in a mirror. You’ve seen photos of yourself. But when you see yourself on the movie screen for the first time, that’s a very different image. You see yourself as other people see you. And it doesn’t fit in at all with your own conception . . . I was plump, and I didn’t like that nose. And why was I spinning around like that, laughing and talking too much? I just didn’t like myself. Oh dear, I knew at once, they wouldn’t want to put me in a movie.”
Molander, however, had exactly the opposite impression. “He could have watched the rushes of a thousand girls that day,” wrote Burgess, “girls more beautiful than Ingrid, better trained than Ingrid, but not one in a thousand, not one in a million, would have achieved the necessary miracle. The miracle was that peculiar transmutation from the live girl performing in front of a camera into the flickering image on a silver screen, a transmutation identified by words of spectacular banality, but total accuracy as ‘star quality.’ Miss Ingrid Bergman had star quality.”
“I didn’t look very good, did I?” Ingrid told Molander. “I think if I did some more I could be better later.” It was her first use of a phrase that would become her trademark at the studio. After practically every scene she would say, “I think I’ll be better later.” Inevitably, when the film crews saw her coming, they would say, “Here comes Betterlater.”
“The thing now,” Swanstrom said after the test, “is what do we do with you?”
“There’s Edvin’s The Count of the Monk’s Bridge,” suggested Molander.
“That’s right,” said Swanstrom. “We haven’t finished casting that . . . the maid has quite a nice little part.”
As Swanstrom talked about preparing a contract for her to appear alongside Adolphson in the film, Ingrid said, “All right, but remember I’ve got to go back to school for the autumn term.”
In retrospect, it was a laughable comment. School? Ingrid didn’t know it, but Molander was already considering her as the leading lady for another film, Intermezzo, that would later attract the attention of Hollywood. And in a week’s time, when she arrived at Svensk Filmindustri studio to begin work on The Count of the Monk’s Bridge, she would find small pots of flowers that Molander had left for her, along with a note that said, “Där du går, där blommar jorden.”
“Where you go, there blooms the earth.”
Ingrid Bergman had been discovered.
The first time anyone ever heard Ingrid Bergman speak on film, she was playing Elsa, a maid in a seedy hotel in The Count of the Monk’s Bridge, a comedy about a group of young bohemians trying to get around Stockholm’s strict drinking laws.
In a case of art imitating life, Elsa is pursued by the character played by Edvin Adolphson, the actor who was also directing the film and was busy pursuing Ingrid in real life (though she was still dating Lindstrom). Growing up, Ingrid had been, in her words, “the thinnest child ever,” but she had filled out over the last year or two and was round-faced and a bit plump in the movie’s first scene: She is seen struggling to put on a black-and-red striped dress in time to rush to the window and shout a greeting down to Adolphson in the street.
In her journal, Ingrid did not mention her affair with Adolphson but wrote that during the shooting, he scolded her for her “impudence and audacity” and called her “completely impossible” to work with. He was apparently referring to the moment when she began lecturing another actor, Tollie Zellman, one of Sweden’s greatest comediennes, about how to play her character, who worked in a fish shop.
“Look here, that isn’t the way you wrap a fish,” Ingrid said, coming behind the counter. “I’ll show you how. You wrap a fish like this. I’ve seen how they do it at the market. Put it there and turn the paper over like this, then turn in that edge and roll it over like that. See?”
Ingrid then blithely walked back in front of the counter to resume the scene. Stunned, Zellman said in a very loud voice, “And who’s this?”
Adolphson laughed a bit nervously and said, “Well, she’s a young girl who’s just started.”
“Oh,” said Tollie, “she starts well, doesn’t she?”
Ingrid earned $150 for her twelve days of work on the film but stuck around for another six wee
ks to spend time with Adolphson and soak up the filmmaking process. She carefully watched cinematographer Åke Dahlquist to learn about what cameras and lenses to use, how to set up the lighting, and other tricks of the trade. Like her father, she always carried a camera with her, and she used it to document Dahlquist’s methods and techniques.
When filming was over, the producers and administrators at Svensk Filmindustri told Ingrid that she had tremendous potential and urged her to reconsider her decision to return to drama school in the fall. Why stay in school when they could offer her so many golden opportunities in films? As she pondered this, Ingrid wondered how she could reach her full potential at a school that clearly valued seniority over acting ability.
The studio offered Ingrid a contract paying seventy-five kronor [$7.50 U.S.] per day with a 5,000 kronor [$500] guarantee in the first year that would increase for the next two years – plus another 2,000 kronor per year for private acting lessons. They would give her all the clothes she used in each film and try to get her theater acting jobs. “How can you refuse such a contract?” she asked in her journal. “But I do not want to give up my theatrical career.”
In August, Ingrid requested a meeting with Olaf Molander. “You’re telling me you want to leave and work in moving pictures?” he thundered.
“You may be right about movies, Mr. Molander - I know they’re not important,” she said. “But to me it’s a short cut. I can do a couple of movie parts and get myself a little reputation and then come back to the school to continue my education, and perhaps get small parts like the one I had with Mr. Sjöberg.”
Molander showed her little sympathy. “Now listen to me, Miss Bergman,” he said. “You have talent. I will admit that, but if you go to the movies now, you will destroy that talent. If you stay with us, you will become a good actress, possibly even a great actress. You will not make a success of movies or any other acting requirement because you have no training, as yet, for any sort of professional performance. You will not be able to handle your posture, your voice, or your emotions. You know nothing about life. All this you will be taught in the next two years here!”