Ingrid Bergman was born 100 years ago next month, on Aug. 29, 1915. The Museum of Fine Arts is celebrating the occasion with an 11-film retrospective that starts Friday and runs through Aug. 27. Titles in the series below are in boldface.
There’s a lot to celebrate. Bergman won three Oscars and had the most remarkable career trajectory of any star in Hollywood history. That’s no exaggeration. With characteristic matter-of-factness, Bergman put it best: “I’ve gone from saint to whore and back to saint again, all in one lifetime.” As combinations of comedown and comeback go, that’s hard to top.
The American public does not like its assumptions challenged. Having fallen in love with Bergman the innocent — Ilse Lund in “Casablanca” (1942), a baseball-playing nun in “The Bells of St. Mary’s” (1945), the title character in “Joan of Arc” (1948) — it was shocked, shocked, to discover the flesh-and-blood woman who left her first husband to have a child with Roberto Rossellini and make movies with him in Italy. The irony is that while on the pedestal moviegoers had placed her Bergman had had affairs with Spencer Tracy (her costar in “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” 1941), Gary Cooper (her costar in “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” 1943, and “Saratoga Trunk,” 1945), the photographer Robert Capa, Gregory Peck (her costar in “Spellbound,” 1945), and the director Victor Fleming.
Ernest Hemingway, a friend, had successfully lobbied for her to play Maria, in the film adaptation of his “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” He nicely expressed this dual view of Bergman, describing her in a 1954 letter as “Sweet and good and honest and married to the 22 pound rat.”
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Fortunately, the American public is too easily distracted to hold grudges. It also helped that Bergman divorced Rossellini. After a decade in Europe, Bergman resumed her Hollywood film career. Her first Oscar had been for “Gaslight” (1944). The second, for “Anastasia” (1956), acknowledged her return to saintly status.
Bergman made six movies with Rossellini. Two are in the MFA series: “Stromboli” (1950) and “Journey to Italy” (1954). No Hollywood star of her era worked with a more impressive, or varied, list of directors. Bergman must be the only actress to appear in films by Rossellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir (“Elena and Her Men,” 1956), and Ingmar Bergman (“Autumn Sonata,” 1978). Two of the three she made with Hitchcock are in the retrospective, “Spellbound” and “Notorious” (1946). The other is “Under Capricorn” (1949).
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Bergman also worked with Fleming (“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and “Joan of Arc”), Michael Curtiz (“Casablanca”), George Cukor (“Gaslight”), Leo McCarey (“The Bells of St. Mary’s”), Stanley Donen (“Indiscreet,” 1958), Sidney Lumet (“Murder on the Orient Express,” 1974, her third Oscar), and Vincente Minnelli (“A Matter of Time,” 1976). Not all of those projects turned out well. “A Matter of Time” is a candidate for worst movie made by a major director. The point isn’t consistency, which can be a euphemism for complacency. The point is Bergman’s artistic ambition and willingness to challenge herself. Only Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, among her contemporaries, rivaled her in that regard.
Bergman became one of the classic Hollywood stars at least in part because she wasn’t a classic Hollywood star. She was something like a revolutionary figure in the Studio Era. It’s not just that she was European, like Marlene Dietrich or her fellow Swede Greta Garbo. If anything, they out-Hollywooded Hollywood, with their preternatural sophistication and rarefied glamour. Instead, Bergman was something like the girl next door — assuming the girl next door had a radiant, wholesome beauty and superb acting talent, spoke charmingly accented English, and was neither slinky nor petite.
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At 5 feet 9 inches, Bergman was an inch taller than her “Anastasia” costar, Yul Brynner. When she noted this, he was King-of-Siam enraged. “You think I want to play it standing on a box?” he said. “I’ll show the world what a big horse you are!” Recounting the encounter in her memoirs, Bergman added, “I never had a complex about my height after that.”
The girl next door also had a great deal of luck, as any star must. If Bergman were slightly younger, World War II would have kept her from Hollywood for six or seven years longer — too long for lightning to have struck? Slightly older, she might have pursued a career in Nazi Germany; as it was, she did make one film there, “Die vier Gesellen” (1938).
Ilse Lund, a nun, Joan of Arc (twice, in fact): These were not roles Dietrich or Garbo could have played. Neither could Davis or Hepburn. Those actresses had a manneredness that was assumed to be central to female stardom — until Bergman showed otherwise. There was a naturalness to her onscreen, which in its very different way proved as ravishing as the heightened artifice of the stars who’d preceded her.
Reviewing “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” James Agee touched on this quality. “Miss Bergman not only bears a startling resemblance to an imaginable human being; she really knows how to act, in a blend of poetic grace with quiet realism which almost never appears in American pictures.” It’s subject to debate how real it can be for a Swede in blooming health to play a Spanish woman who’d recently been gang-raped. That a critic as unillusioned and discerning as Agee would write such a thing is no small tribute to Bergman.
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Perhaps Bergman’s greatest talent was to understand that naturalness on screen owes even more to attitude and understatement than minimal makeup. When Isabella Rossellini was thinking of giving up modeling for acting, her mother gave her some advice. “Keep it simple,” Bergman said. “Make a blank face and the music and the story will fill it in.”
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.