Ingrid Bergman

by Grace Carter

In the play, Ingrid’s character, Helen Lancaster, thrives on new adventures, imparting her zest for life with everyone she meets. “I’m restless, always grasping after some new experience, some new pleasure,” Helen says. “Life must be a perpetual adventure or it’s worth nothing. One must constantly renew oneself with fresh experiences, fresh scenes, new friends. The only thing in the world that appalls me is the threat of stagnation, boredom, dreariness. That - never! Never!” Ingrid could have written the lines herself.

  Before heading to England, she went back to her home in Choisel and learned that Schmidt and Kristina were expecting their first child. She was devastated. “Except for the two servants, the house was empty and everything got to me,” she recalled. “Memories. Mistakes. Arguments. Joys. All the years. I couldn’t stand it any longer.”

  Distressed, she went to Paris and checked into the Raphael Hotel. As if by fate, she ran into Rossellini, who was also staying there since it was his favorite hotel. He took her to dinner. “He knew when I was upset, and he bought me a hot-water bottle and some aspirin,” she recalled. “He sensed, without my saying a word to him, that I was disturbed about the divorce, and that I was looking backwards in some despair.”

  At lunch the next day, Rossellini told her, “Ingrid, don’t ever look back. You’re a nervous wreck trying to figure out what to do with the past. To hell with the past. Look ahead - go forward.” He kissed her on the cheek and went off to catch his plane. At that moment, she had no way of knowing that she would never see him again.

  On May 10, Waters of the Moon premiered at the Chichester Festival Theatre. As usual, Ingrid stole the show. One day, Hiller came into her dressing room as she was putting on her makeup. “I really should hate you - I should hate you,” Hiller said. “Every time I go shopping in Chichester, people stop me in the street and say, ‘Miss Hillier’ - they always call me that - ‘I saw the play last night, and isn’t Miss Bergman wonderful?’”

  On June 3, 1977, Ingrid got another reminder of how fleeting life can be. On that day, she went out to lunch and returned home to her rented cottage, a half-hour’s drive from the theater. She walked through the door and found a note from the maid saying that Rossellini’s sister Fiorella had called: “Please call Rome urgently. Children are okay.” When Ingrid called back, Fiorella said that Rossellini had died of a heart attack. When the chest pains started, he had called his first wife who lived across the street. She ran to him, but it was too late; he died almost immediately.

  Ingrid called their children, then Pia and Schmidt, and others who needed to know. “Of course, I was dreadfully upset,” she recalled. “Roberto had filled, and still filled, a big part of my life. His seventieth birthday seemed like only yesterday.”

  At five o’clock, Ruth Roberts said it was time to drive to the theater. “I can’t,” Ingrid cried. “I just can’t. I can’t go down and play this gay, amusing, lighthearted Helen Lancaster and listen to all the laughs, and do all the things . . .”

  Roberts insisted. By the time they arrived, everybody had heard the news on the radio and offered to help any way they could. “We’re with you,” one colleague told her. “We’ll help you out,” another said. “Don’t worry, darling, we’ll manage.”

  She had dragged herself to the theater, but how could she perform? Then Ingrid remembered Signe Hasso, who years ago was appearing in a play in New York when she received word that her son had been killed in a car accident in California. When Ingrid called her, she was astonished to hear Hasso say she would be going onstage that night anyway. But how, Ingrid wanted to know. How could she possibly perform after getting such news? Hasso said she had no choice: “Otherwise, I’ll go insane.”

  “Now I knew what she meant,” Ingrid said. “I’d always known it really. I was Helen Lancaster. I wasn’t Ingrid Bergman. I was that gay, wealthy, happy woman, who stayed happy by pushing most of reality out of sight.”

  So Ingrid went on that night. When she got home, she spent hours on the telephone. At four in the morning, Robin called. “I know it’s late, but I’ve been trying to give other people encouragement and keep them going all this time,” he said. “I’ve tried so hard all day, but now I want to cry with you.” Then he burst into tears. So did his mother.

  Later, as she wept privately, Ingrid thought it was ironic that many of Rossellini’s movies were badly reviewed upon their release but were now considered masterpieces. She remembered the day she told him that she had seen on television the film he made in India. In it, an old beggar had a little monkey who made children laugh by jumping around and holding out a tin cup for money. When the old man got sick, fell down, and seemed ready to die, vultures began to circle and the monkey tried to wake him up, then tried to cover him to protect him. “He chattered away heartbreakingly, all the time his eyes on those terrible vultures,” Ingrid recalled. “But he was chained so he couldn’t leave, and finally he nestled down with his little head crouched as if he were going to defend the old man. It was so moving. I just wept.”

  When she told Rossellini the story, he had said, “You know why? That was you and me. You were the monkey. Always trying to protect me from the vultures. That’s why you cried.”

  By a twist of fate, Schmidt called her the very next day from New York to say that Kristina had given birth to their son. At age sixty, he had finally become a dad again. “So there was death, and there was life,” she said in her memoir. “That was what Lars had been missing all those years. I was happy for him. My relationship with Lars, which began so long ago, continues to be the most important of my life.”

  It was a strange time in Ingrid’s life – full of resolution of long-simmering conflicts and glances back on a turbulent life. There were also some deeply rewarding firsts. When the Chichester season ended in the middle of June 1977, Ingrid had a break before rehearsals would begin in late fall for the Brighton production of Waters of the Moon, followed by a London run. So she went to Stockholm and Norway to have a completely new experience – working on a film called Autumn Sonata, her first time collaborating with the legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. It would be her very last feature film.

  The two Bergmans – who were not related – had met years earlier. Ingmar had known Schmidt for a long time, having both started out in the theater in Malmö in the south of Sweden. One day, the three of them had lunched in Stockholm, and Ingrid felt an instant rapport with the great director, who insisted they make a film together. They exchanged letters and ideas for projects, but for many years, nothing came to fruition. Ingmar, however, was determined. “It’s written on my forehead in fire,” he wrote to her. “The picture with Ingrid shall be done.”

  Finally, he found just the right story and phoned Ingrid on Danholmen Island asking her to appear in Autumn Sonata. She would play a world-famous pianist, the mother of a character played by Liv Ullmann, and the movie would be in Swedish. Ingrid agreed. After acting in movies and plays in five different languages during a long career, she had not made a movie in her native tongue for decades.

  But she received a shock when the script arrived. “It was so big it seemed to me to be a six-hour movie,” she recalled. “I liked the idea of his story - there never was any hesitation about that – but it was just too much.” Her character was cold and unapproachable - rambling on, with vague justifications for her actions, and her daughter was petulant and whiny.

  When she called Ingmar, he said, “I write everything down that comes into my head. Of course, we will cut.” So Ingrid left her Swedish island and went to his Swedish island, Faro, to discuss the script. No sooner had Ingmar picked her up at the airport, however, than Ingrid launched into a diatribe about what was wrong with the script. “‘Ingmar, I don’t like this-and-that, and that-and-this in the script,’” he recalled. “‘Why does this mother have to talk like she does in her conversation. She’s so brutal in the way she expresses herself.’”

  They drove in silence for a few moments. The director was shocked that she would start off
the visit that way. Then Ingrid said, “Ingmar, I have to say one thing to you before we start working together. I always talk first and think afterwards.”

  “I thought that was a remarkable and wonderful revelation,” Ingmar recalled. “It became the key to our relationship because her absolutely spontaneous reaction - even when it’s not tactful - is the key to her whole character. You have to listen when Ingrid says things. Sometimes, at first you might even find them nonsensical and silly, but it turns out differently. You have to listen because that immediate reaction of hers is very important.”

  When they arrived at Ingmar’s house, Ingrid met his wife - in a comic twist, also named Ingrid Bergman. The next day, they discussed the script. Autumn Sonata tells the story of Charlotte Andergast, the pianist whose relationship with her daughter, Eva, mirrors the tensions that existed between Ingrid and her daughter Pia. There is an intensely emotional reunion between Eva, played by Ullmann, and her famous, driven mother who often neglected her.

  At first, Ingrid worried about Pia seeing the movie. And did she really want the world to see her negligence? Did she want everyone to think she was a bad mother, and to know how hard it had been to atone for the damage she’d inflicted? Though Charlotte’s actions and words seemed to hit too close to home, in the end, Ingrid wanted to make Charlotte even more like herself. She even asked that Eva’s lines be replaced by Pia’s own words: “I don’t know which I hated most - when you were at home or when you were on tour . . . you made life hell for Papa and me.”

  To Ingmar, the film was all about love, Ingrid recalled: “The presence and absence of love; the longing for love - love’s lies, love’s distortions, and love as our sole chance of survival. And I suppose he was right. Well, almost right.”

  As usual, Ingrid was direct when she thought Ingmar was wrong. “Look, the script is terribly depressing,” she told him. “In life, I have three real daughters, and we do have our little discussions from time to time - but this! Can’t we have a little joke here and there?”

  “No,” said Ingmar, “No jokes. We’re not doing your story. Her name is Charlotte, the world-famous pianist.”

  Ullmann, Ingmar’s muse and lover who had a child with him, agreed with Ingrid. The mothers both teased him. “Ingmar, the people you know must be monsters,” Ingrid said. But the director refused to budge.

  It was exciting for Ullmann, who was exactly Pia’s age (thirty-eight), to get to work with Ingrid. “I’d read all about her and at a certain time in my life I was compared to her because of the scandal of having a child of Ingmar’s out of wedlock,” she recalled. “Meeting Ingrid was a great experience because I thought a woman who had been through so many things might be full of regrets and also, as a Hollywood film star, perhaps full of sentimentality. Instead, here was the most straightforward woman I’ve ever met in my life.”

  Ingmar usually worked with the same actors in his repertory company; they understood him and what he wanted, so he was not accustomed to being questioned as relentlessly as Ingrid did. “Do you really mean that this woman is going to say all this?” Ingrid said on the first day. “I’m not going to say all this.”

  “We thought this was the first and last day of the entire movie,” Ullman said later, recalling that she escaped into another room to cry because she was sure the film was over. “I was disturbed for both of them, but, of course, at that time mostly for Ingmar because I know how vulnerable he is about what he has written, and how often he thinks, oh, this is perhaps silly? And if somebody says it is silly, then he’s shattered.”

  But when they began filming in the fall, Ingrid could see what made the director so special: “With Ingmar there is so much concentration, so much intimacy - that’s how he creates the intensity that he is after, and that’s what makes him the artist he is.”

  As shooting progressed, Ingrid struggled to understand her character. She also had a hard time adapting to Ingmar’s fondness for tight shots. “The camera is always in close-up,” she recalled, “picking up every nuance on your face, every suggestion made by the brow or the eye, the lips, or the chin.” This was a difficult transition because she had been doing so much theater that her habit was to play with big gestures – physically and vocally – for the people way up in the balcony.

  “On the other hand, I knew the things a close-up can do, sometimes invent things that aren’t there at all,” she said. “In Casablanca, there was often nothing in my face, nothing at all. But the audience put into my face what they thought I was giving. They were inventing my thoughts the way they wanted them: they were doing the acting for me.”

  After the first few weeks, the two Bergmans began to understand each other better. They developed a rhythm of working together through the ebb and flow of their ideas and emotions. Gradually, their problems disappeared.

  Even a potential conflict over the ending was averted. Ingmar intended the film to end in disillusionment, with the rift between mother and daughter unhealed, despite Charlotte’s pleas for forgiveness. But at Ingrid’s request, he agreed to add a letter from Eva to Charlotte that offers hope for their relationship. “Dear Mama,” the letter says. “There is a kind of mercy after all. I will never let you vanish out of my life again. I am going to persist. I won’t give up even if it is too late. I don’t think it is too late. It must not be too late.”

  By the time filming was over, Ingmar was regretting that he did not get to work with Ingrid more during his long career. The scene when Ingrid’s character talks about the death of her friend in the hospital was, he said, “one of the most beautiful film scenes in my whole life as a director.” Others would agree. For her semi-autobiographical portrayal of Charlotte, Ingrid would earn her seventh Oscar nomination (though she would not win).

  About two weeks before shooting finished, Ingrid had more than filmmaking to worry about: She felt something under her arm. “I began to think something is growing, and I became terribly nervous and upset, and, of course, my anxiety began to show,” she recalled.

  “What is it?” Ingmar asked her. “Why are you so worried?”

  She explained, saying she would have to go back into the hospital. The director told her that after finishing a few scenes, she should return to London immediately. He could compensate for her absence by doing location shots with an understudy wearing her clothes.

  Ingrid did the scenes and flew back to London. “We should take it out,” said the doctor. Once again, the lump was malignant. It was a simple operation, and Ingrid was only in the hospital for three days. “But, of course, it was very worrying,” she recalled. “I realized now that this was something that had moved from one side to the other.”

  In the late fall of 1977, she began a schedule of radiation treatments in the morning, then straight to rehearsals for Waters of the Moon that would open in Brighton in January for two weeks and then move to London. Griff James picked her up every morning at nine to take her to the hospital. He would sit in a waiting room as she made her way down a long hallway and through doors labeled “Nuclear Medicine.”

  Ingrid found a townhouse in Chelsea, near a park and the Thames River, reminiscent of the Strandvägen in Stockholm. She decorated the two-story home in earth tones and wallpaper covered with leafy branches. She took walks along the river and watched the boats sail by as she rested on a bench and studied her script. That Chelsea townhouse would be her residence for the remainder of her days.

  At rehearsals, Ingrid gave no indication of how seriously ill she was, although she later confided the truth to her co-star Wendy Hiller. She kept the news as quiet as possible; all her cast-mates noticed was that Ingrid appeared to be tired, needing more rest than usual, and seemed somewhat distracted.

  One day, when James could not take her to the hospital, she hailed a cab. The driver, recognizing her, said, “I thought all you film stars stayed in bed until twelve.”

  “Some of us have to start rehearsals pretty early,” she replied. He must have been puzzled when he dropped her off
at the Middlesex Hospital. He could not know that the great Ingrid Bergman was simply playing her last, most dramatic role: cancer patient.

  When Waters of the Moon opened in Brighton in January 1978, expectations were high for this rendition of N. G. Hunter’s play, set in a country-house hotel where Ingrid’s character – the wealthy, spoiled Helen Lancaster – is marooned with her husband and pretty young daughter.

  But on opening night, nothing went right. First, the recorded music that was supposed to get the characters dancing did not play, causing a temporary halt in production. Later, Ingrid’s Helen ran to the window saying, “Listen, the bells - the bells are ringing!” but no bells rang, causing the audience to roar with laughter. In another scene, Helen says, “I hope the New Year will bring you all closer to your hearts’ desires,” and then she accidentally falls, spilling champagne on her husband, played by Paul Hardwick. Fortunately, Ingrid improvised a witty line: “I don’t mean that close.”

  Two weeks later, the production moved to London’s famous Haymarket Theater where Ingrid had always wanted to appear. She felt fine during most of the run and critics raved, calling her performance the soul of the play and her character completely irresistible. (Later, she would rank it among her top theatrical accomplishments, right up there with Joan of Lorraine and Tea and Sympathy.)

  But in June, just a week before the run was over, Ingrid felt something as she was putting on a dress. “I knew,” she recalled later, “it had started again.” She sat down in a chair and said to Louie, her dresser, “Isn’t it funny. I have just one more week to go, and then I have to go back into the hospital.” Louie burst into tears, and Ingrid tried to comfort her.

  The cancer had invaded her right breast, which had to be removed. Ingrid scheduled the surgery for July, after the show ended; in the meantime, she grew more tired and frail. Cortisone injections caused her face to swell. Her back and shoulder hurt, making her gait a little more unsteady. But she remained the committed professional, as always, missing only two shows and refusing to burden anyone with her health complaints.