One of the Greatest Performing Artists of All TimeWhen she appeared on the screen without

One of the Greatest Performing Artists of All Time

When she appeared on the screen without makeup, cosmetic sales in the United States declined. When she played a nun, convent enrollments increased. A fan walked a sheep all the way from Sweden to Rome as a gift for her. Letters were delivered to her addressed simply "Ingrid Bergman—London."

One of the most glamorous women of our time, Ingrid was never anything but her supremely simple self: a stage -struck girl, who loved to gobble ice cream and walk in the min. She wanted to play every part, take every trip, give every party, drink every glass of champagne that life could offer. "I never regretted anything I did," she once said—"just the things I didn't do."

Ingrid lived successively in some of the world's most interesting cities—Stockholm, Hollywood, Rome, Paris and Lon don—and played starring roles on stage, screen and television in five languages. She made 47 films and won three Oscars and an Emmy.

She had a ferocious dedication to her work. "If you took acting away from me," she once claimed, "I'd stop breathing." When Ernest Hemingway told her she would have to cut off her hair for the role of Mafia in For Whom the Bell Tolls, she shot back, "To get that part, I'd cut my head off!" She would rehearse tirelessly until any hour of the night, begging to repeat a scene long after the director was satisfied. Once she even proposed that she live on the set until the filming was over.

At the peak of her stardom, Ingrid insisted on taking screen tests and turned down offers to play the most important parts but accepted offers to play minor parts that were unusual or difficult. She fought for roles like the young bride on the edge of madness in Gaslight and the mousy Swedish missionary in Murder on the Orient Express(both brought her Academy Awards).

Working as an actress who would replace Ingrid during her illness or injury meant never getting the chance to work. She broke her foot at the beginning of the American run of The Constant Wife and played the next five weeks in a wheel chair. No matter how ill she might be, she would say with a grin, "Dr. Stage will cure me" and there she always was when the curtain rose.

From her earliest childhood in Stockholm, Ingrid never had a moment's doubt about where she was going. At 14 she scribbled in her diary her dreams of starring in a movie opposite Sweden's most popular actor—and five years later she was doing just that.

Her luck was as 'phenomenal as her talent. In New York City, a Swedish couple praised a film of hers to their son, an elevator operator in the apartment building where one of film producer David Selznic's young talent scouts lived. Six months later, Ingrid was on her way to Hollywood.

One charming role followed another: the lonely piano teacher in Intermezzo; the passionate psychiatrist in Spellbound, the baseball-playing nun in The Bells of St. Mary's. Within a few years, she was one of American's most popular film stars and a top draw at the world's box office.

Then, one night in 1948, Ingrid went to see Open City, a realistic movie of wartime Rome produced and directed by Roberto Rossellini. Drawn to Roazellini's stormy genius—"I think I fell in love with Roberto the moment I saw the film," Ingrid confided to me later, she impulsively wrote and offered to make a movie with him.

Ingrid flew to Rome—and stayed for seven years. Still married to Petter Lindstrom, she bore Rossellini a child, causing public outrage. And Ingrid was reviled on the floor of the U.S. Senate as unworthy to "set foot on American soil again."

Transformed overnight into box-office poison, Ingrid found her Hollywood career in ruins. The films she made with Rossellini were largely failures—and so, in the end, was their marriage.

In 1956 the clouds finally

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