Ingrid Bergman

by Grace Carter

  As she continued her stage role in The Constant Wife, Sidney Lumet, director of 12 Angry Men and Long Day’s Journey into Night, invited her to participate in his star-studded film version of Murder on the Orient Express. Lumet suggested Ingrid play the aging Russian Princess Natalia Dragomiroff, but Ingrid insisted on playing the smaller role of the dopey Swedish missionary Greta Ohlsson. The job would involve just a few days of work and would pay a handsome $100,000 ($500,000 today).

  Murder on the Orient Express, based on the Agatha Christie novel featuring her famed Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, began production in England’s Elstree Studios in the early spring of 1974. The roster of stars sharing the spotlight included Albert Finney (as Poirot), Lauren Bacall, Martin Balsam, Jacqueline Bisset, Sean Connery, George Coulouris, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Rachel Roberts, Richard Widmark, and Michael York.

  Ingrid’s appearance in the film was brief - she was onscreen only four and a half minutes - and was shot in one take. In the scene, an unglamorous Ingrid put audiences through their emotional paces in what Lumet later called a brilliant, undiluted performance. Ingrid’s portrayal of the victimized nun was so outstanding that it earned the actress a fifth Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress - one of the film’s five nominations.

  In May 1974, with both her stage and film roles completed, Ingrid decided to go to New York to visit Pia, who by then had given birth to a baby boy, Justin. Ingrid was not there for the delivery, but she found it funny and strange that both Schmidt and Rossellini were since they both happened to be in New York at that time.

  Until that moment, the two men had never met, although Rossellini had always harbored bitter feelings for the man who replaced him as Ingrid’s husband. Isabella, who was also in New York at the time, reported to her mother about the encounter in all its awkward humor. As the two men stared at the baby through the glass partition, an NBC camera team arrived to shoot their newscaster Pia’s baby, unaware of the scoop they were missing by not recognizing them.

  “They were so immensely polite to each other you couldn’t believe it,” Isabella laughed. “Opening doors for each other: ‘After you, Mr. Rossellini.’ ‘No, certainly not, after you, Mr. Schmidt.’ Offering each other cigarettes, and: ‘You have the first taxi, Mr. Schmidt.’ ‘No, you must have the first taxi, Mr. Rossellini.’ ‘Well, if you insist.”

  As the taxi drove off, Rossellini looked at Isabella, grinned, and said, “Let him get pneumonia!”

  The laughs had died down by the time Ingrid went to get a second opinion about her lump from a New York specialist. The doctor examined her and said she should have a biopsy done immediately.

  That would be impossible, Ingrid said, what with her husband’s birthday coming up on June 11, and a planned visit to the chalet they had bought in Switzerland. Then there was the party in Portugal they were giving for their friend, the travel writer Hans Ostelius, for his seventieth birthday on June 15. “After that, I can have the operation,” she said.

  The doctor got very angry. “How in the world can you drag on like this?” he thundered. “This is ridiculous. Right into the hospital - tonight!”

  “No-ooo,” Ingrid wailed. “Absolutely not! I’m here in New York and I’ve lots of plans, and when I’m through with them, I’ll go into the hospital.”

  Furious, the doctor called Ingrid’s doctor in London, spoke with him for a few minutes, then handed the phone to Ingrid. “Yes,” the British specialist said. “I must agree with my colleague that you are pushing it very, very far. You should come back to London immediately.”

  Ingrid hung up the phone and held firm, saying she would be going bicycling the next day in Central Park with Pia and her grandson and would not have the operation until after her husband’s birthday.

  “What is more important?” the doctor cried. “Your husband’s birthday party or your life?”

  “My husband’s birthday party!” Ingrid said.

  In the end, she celebrated Schmidt’s birthday and went to their chalet in Switzerland – but just for one day. Instead of going to Portugal, she spent her friend Ostelius’s birthday, June 15, 1974, in a London hospital. The results of the biopsy were definite: It was, indeed, cancer, and she would have to undergo an emergency mastectomy on her left breast.

  Rossellini sent all three children from Rome; Pia came from New York, and Schmidt was with her, too. When Ingrid woke up from the operation, she recalled later, “I was still groggy from the anesthesia. I was saying, ‘Oh, how tiresome this woman is, crying all the time. Please ask her not to cry any more. She is just crying and crying.’ Someone said to me, ‘Darling, that is you crying.’”

  She was lying with her hands locked tightly across her chest and found it impossible to move them. “It is some sort of protection which comes from the mind which says, ‘They are not going to do any more to me!’” she recalled. “The doctor came and I could read his face like an open book. I felt sorry for him because it must be an awful job to go around telling women they are mutilated.”

  Having her children around her was a huge help, she said. “Of course, it is sad,” she said. “I can’t deny that, and I didn’t want to look at myself in the mirror. That’s for sure. I suppose if I had been a younger woman, I would have suffered much more.”

  Ingrid went back to Choisel for two weeks to recuperate before returning to London to start radiation treatments. Ingrid and Isabella took turns staying with her. Though she had been told the radiation would make her sick, “Little by little, I realized that I wasn’t really sick or tired,” she recalled. “I was just afraid. So I said to whichever one was there, ‘Let’s go out and do some shopping.’”

  Ingrid would walk through the streets of London and Ingrid or Isabella would ask anxiously, “Aren’t you tired?” Their mom would say, “No, let’s walk home.” Then she said, “This is silly, me behaving as if I’m an invalid. Let’s go to the theater.” So they went to the theater.

  Eventually, Ingrid returned to Choisel to recuperate, swimming and doing exercises to regain her strength. By January 1975, she felt good enough to tour America with The Constant Wife. For the next four months, she performed in Los Angeles, Denver, Washington, Boston, and New York, breaking ticket-sales records along the way. Ingrid told very few people about her battle with cancer – even Griff James, her close friend and once again the company manager, knew nothing about it.

  In Los Angeles, an antique stage sofa collapsed when Ingrid sat on it, tossing her to the floor. The audience gasped in alarm, but Ingrid, overcoming her initial shock, erupted into laughter, and soon the audience followed suit. Ten minutes later, she apparently forgot about the faulty sofa and repeated the same comic scene. The audience roared again. “She thought the whole thing hilarious,” James said later. “Lots of actresses would have had a tantrum and demanded that somebody be fired. She thought it was all a huge joke.”

  Ingrid’s ability to improvise again came into play when she fell and twisted her ankle between the matinee and evening show. A doctor determined that she had broken two small bones in her foot and needed a cast immediately.

  With a sold-out crowd and not enough cash to offer refunds, the theater manager was in a panic. Ingrid kept her cool and advised him to tell the crowd what had happened and that they would be starting a little late. The cast was put on her foot, and Ingrid was provided a wheelchair. The stage manager quickly made some blocking adjustments to accommodate Ingrid’s wheelchair, and when the curtain finally went up at about nine-thirty – an hour-and-a-half late – the audience was treated to the sight of Ingrid Bergman improvising while she bumped into people, got caught on the carpet, and crashed into scenery. It was a bit like watching a play-within-a-play, and the audience was delighted.

  After five weeks, the cast came off, but Ingrid and the audiences enjoyed the wheelchair so much, she continued riding around the stage into the second week of the Washington, D.C., run. Finally, she got back on her feet – but so
mething was missing. “Though the show went all right, it was really not as big a success as when she was in her chair,” James recalled. “So she took her curtain call in the wheelchair and that brought the house down. Because that is what they’d come to see - Ingrid Bergman in a wheelchair.”

  While playing in Boston, the producers canceled a few performances so Ingrid could attend the Oscars with her husband. She had not only been nominated for Murder on the Orient Express but had also been asked to present a lifetime achievement award to Jean Renoir, who was sick and unable to attend. She got a big shock when she was pronounced the winner for Best Supporting Actress, her third Oscar – so surprised, in fact, that she said she thought Valentina Cortese should have won for her performance in François Truffaut’s Day for Night, which had won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. From the podium, she sought out Cortese and said, “Please forgive me, Valentina, I didn’t mean to!”

  Ingrid returned to finish out her tour of The Constant Wife and decided she wanted to move the show to New York even though that was not originally part of the plan. She was feeling physically strong, so why not? To some, it was a puzzling move. She had played Broadway many times, had enough money, and knew the production, never very popular even with out-of-town critics, would surely be savaged when it got to Broadway. But the actors knew why she did it.

  “Because in the cast there were a lot of kids, a lot of actors who’d never played New York,” recalled a member of the cast, Marti Stevens, “and might never get the chance to play New York, and playing New York to an American actor is what playing in the West End is to a British actor. Tops.” As Ingrid put it, “They’ll be seen on Broadway and maybe they’ll get other jobs.”

  Predictably, the critics pounced when the play opened in April 1975. Clive Barnes in The New York Times said, “Miss Bergman, while a radiantly handsome woman with an imperiously regal air, does not seem a thirty-six-year-old. As a result, all the roles have been, as it were, geriatrically upgraded, with results that detract from the play’s impact.”

  But The Constant Wife sold well enough to run for five weeks, and the actors got the break Ingrid wanted for them. “They were right in calling The Constant Wife antiquated in style,” Ingrid told Variety. “But the theme is not dated a bit. It’s just as timely as forty-nine years ago when it was written. As for the age of the characters, Constance Middleton doesn’t have to be thirty-five or thirty-six. The romantic life of women today isn’t over at forty. Constance could just as well be fifty or even sixty. I don’t know yet, but maybe she could be seventy.”

  For her generosity and many other reasons, Ingrid was adored by the other actors. “What can you say about her?” Stevens said later. “She’s almost impossible to catch in words. She’s a natural wonder who can transfer the essence of herself to a part whether on stage or screen. On first impression, you think there must be something phony here. Maybe that’s due to a lifetime’s experience in a world of actresses. But there isn’t. There’s a sort of dazzle about her. In a bar, on a street, she doesn’t diminish. There’s no place you can put her where she gets less; she gets better.”

  Though Schmidt continued to accompany Ingrid to Hollywood functions and to support her during her health traumas and other bad times, in 1975, they quietly ended their marriage. “It was very secret,” Ingrid said later. “Not even my friends knew about it for a long time.” Schmidt later said he had always known where he ranked on the list of her priorities. She did not deny it, agreeing that acting was her whole world. Schmidt would later marry his girlfriend Kristina and have the child he so badly wanted.

  “I had no feeling of bitterness,” she recalled. “I wanted a divorce because I wanted the position clear. I knew Lars wanted a child (with Kristina), and I didn’t want that baby ever to be able to accuse me of not letting his father go.” Perhaps she was remembering how Lindstrom didn’t let her go after she began her affair with Rossellini – and the enormous trauma that followed, especially after she became pregnant. “[Lars] had even suggested that we adopt a baby, but I had felt that with four children already, I had enough on my hands. But that was selfish of me, too.”

  Once again, Ingrid was free. She could focus exclusively on her work and her children. With cancer seemingly behind her, she was determined to seize every chance to enjoy life. “Ingrid is about fun and enjoyment,” Stevens said. “Any excuse for a celebration. Where shall we find a laugh?”

  For about two years, Ingrid had a solid run of invigorating work and good health, basic conditions of life that she was increasingly grateful for. In the fall of 1975, she traveled to Rome to make a musical fantasy film called A Matter of Time with director Vincente Minnelli and his daughter Liza. Now sixty years old, Ingrid was the right age to play an eccentric once-famous contessa living in poverty and rapidly losing touch with reality. She took the intriguing part not only for the money - $250,000 ($1.1 million today) - but because it allowed her to spend time in Rome with her daughters Isabella and Ingrid.

  Isabella was excited to be making her acting debut in the film – a small role as a young nun, purposely named Sister Pia – while Ingrid helped her mother with her makeup. The role also gave the elder Ingrid the opportunity to work with her Gaslight co-star Charles Boyer, who played the contessa’s estranged husband. Boyer had struggled through hard times since making Gaslight three decades earlier; his only child died in 1965 in an accident (or possibly suicide) while handling a gun, and his wife was suffering from a brain tumor. She would die in August 1978, leading a distraught Boyer to take his life two days later by overdosing on Seconal.

  The movie was plagued with problems and would not rank as one of Ingrid’s finer efforts. The twenty-nine-year-old Liza Minelli was badly miscast as a nineteen-year-old peasant girl working as a hotel chambermaid. And the dialogue was atrocious, leading to a drubbing from the critics.

  But while she was working in Rome, Ingrid derived much joy from rekindling her friendship with Rossellini. Both he and his career had stabilized; he had settled into playing the role of the neo-realist legend of the past, making television documentaries and speaking on college campuses. The two sometimes had dinner together, laughing like old friends and talking about their children.

  During this time, not knowing how long her good health would last, Ingrid began thinking about her legacy. So in 1976, she embarked on a project unlike any she had done before - writing her memoir. For decades, she had resisted all offers to tell her story – until her son Robin said, “Mother, do you realize that when you are dead many people will throw themselves on your life story taking information from gossip columns, rumors, and interviews. We, your children, can never defend you because we don’t know the truth. I wish you’d put it down.”

  Moved by Robin’s remarks, Ingrid decided he was right. For the sake of her children, she would tell her story. Her collaborator would be Alan Burgess, who had penned, among other books, The Small Woman that was adapted into the 1958 film The Sixth Inn of Happiness. Ingrid, whose letters demonstrated a deft literary touch, had initially planned to write the bulk of the book herself. But after finding so many diaries, letters, and newspaper articles, she realized what an enormous undertaking it would be and she and Burgess decided he would write the book in her voice.

  But when the first chapters came in, she was not at all pleased. Nor was she happy with Burgess. He was a heavy drinker; as a result, the writing was disorganized and full of inaccuracies. Also, it was difficult to fix the problems with someone who was frequently drunk.

  Unsure of how to continue, Ingrid put the project on hold and turned her attention to another aspect of her legacy – the people who had been most important in her life. Life is short, and she wanted them to know how she felt about them. In May 1976, Ingrid was spending a week in Rome visiting her children when she had dinner with Rossellini and told him she was sorry she had to leave the next day, May 8, which was his seventieth birthday. “He looked a little disappointed,” Ingrid recalled, “and he was ob
viously quite downcast that everybody had forgotten him.”

  The next evening, Isabella and Ingrid casually suggested to their father that they have dinner at his favorite restaurant. When they arrived, Rossellini was shocked to see the elder Ingrid there, along with his first wife, his oldest son, his sister, nieces, grandchildren – the whole family. He smiled at Ingrid and said, “Ah, you did this!”

  Isabella read a speech that she and her twin sister wrote that made good-natured fun of their father’s favorite expressions, like the dramatic, “I take the bread out of my own mouth to give to the children!” Rossellini cried with laughter and loved it so much he made her read it again, then took it home and framed it.

  Robin Rossellini also made a surprise appearance, dressed up as a waiter. His father ignored him, as he always did to waiters, forcing his upset son to ruin the joke by saying, “Papa! It’s me! Robin!” Rossellini jumped up and hugged his son, and, over his shoulder, gave Ingrid a look of joy. “That look he gave me was worth - well, it was worth the whole effort,” she recalled.

  With her book project taking up much of her time, Ingrid did not perform much and began to get restless to be back on stage. In 1977, she was asked to appear in a revival of N. C. Hunter’s 1951 play, Waters of the Moon, for the Chichester Theatre Festival in England. The play had been a great success in the 1950s, running for a remarkable 835 performances and starring the renowned British actresses Edith Evans, Sybil Thorndike, and Wendy Hiller.

  Hiller had been a young woman when she played it the first time; now she was a sixty-five-year-old stage legend returning to the play in a different role. Impressed by the actress’s fine work in Murder on the Orient Express and excited at the chance to work with her again, Ingrid said “yes” and rented a cottage in Chichester for the spring and summer.