The photograph was simple enough—two people reading a script together in the Italian sun, leaning in with the unguarded ease of those who forgot they might be watched. When it ran in Life magazine in May 1949, it did not say much in words. It did not need to. The image, and the affair it exposed, would end up costing Ingrid Bergman her marriage, her daughter, her career in Hollywood, and her place in the country that had once worshipped her.
Before the scandal, there was the myth. Ingrid Bergman was born on August 29th, 1915, in Stockholm, Sweden. She lost her mother when she was just three and her father, a photographer who adored her, when she was twelve. She cycled through relatives’ households, a shy and tall child absorbed entirely by the idea of becoming an actress.
At 17, she won a place at the Royal Dramatic Theater School in Stockholm, left after a year, and was soon one of Sweden’s most recognized young performers. The film that changed everything was Intermezzo in 1936. She played a pianist who falls in love with a married violinist and ultimately steps back to let him return to his family. It was presented as the noble outcome, and in retrospect there was a deep irony in that story launching her internationally—almost the precise opposite of the choice she would eventually make.
In 1937 she married Petter Lindström, a doctor several years her senior who had a clear sense of how things should be organized, including his wife’s career. Their daughter Pia was born in September 1938. When Bergman went to America for the first time in 1939, she went alone. David O.
Selznick had bought the rights to remake Intermezzo and invited her to reprise her role in English. She was 23, spoke no English, had never been to America, and said yes. The response was immediate. American audiences, used to the elaborate artifice of Hollywood glamour, had never seen anyone quite like her.
She wore almost no makeup, was five-foot-nine and unselfconscious about it, and seemed to think of nothing except the film she was making. Selznick signed her to a longer contract. The decade that followed was one of the most luminous in Hollywood history. She made Casablanca in 1942 with Humphrey Bogart, a role she herself did not particularly love, though the rest of the world held onto it like a lifeline.
She won her first Academy Award for Gaslight in 1944, made Spellbound and Notorious with Alfred Hitchcock, and by the end of the decade the press called her a saint. The problem with a pedestal is what happens when the person on it turns out to be human. Bergman was increasingly restless. Her marriage to Lindström, who managed much of her business affairs with a grip she resented, was strained by long, repeated separations across the ocean.
One biographer noted that when asked why he had not left the marriage himself, Lindström replied with blunt candor that he had stayed for financial reasons. What Bergman wanted, in her own words, was something real. She had seen two films by an Italian director that convinced her a different kind of cinema existed—more honest, less manufactured. His name was Roberto Rossellini.
In early 1949, she wrote him a letter. She told him she admired his work enormously, that she could offer him her name and talent, and that if he had any use for her, she was ready to come to Italy. Rossellini proposed a film set on the volcanic island of Stromboli, remote and difficult, a landscape as bleak as anything she had ever appeared against. She traveled to Rome in the spring of 1949.
Filming began on the island, and somewhere in the combination of the location, the work, and the man directing her, something shifted. Rossellini was 42, separated from his wife, and known throughout the Italian film world for his relationships with actresses, including a long and turbulent involvement with the star Anna Magnani. He was, in nearly every way, the opposite of Petter Lindström. By May 1949, the European press had picked up the story.
The Motion Picture Association of America reportedly warned Bergman that her behavior would destroy her career. Her husband and her ten-year-old daughter were still in America. She stayed in Italy. On August 5th, 1949, her publicist issued a statement acknowledging that she was seeking a divorce.
By December, the columnist Louella Parsons reported that Bergman was pregnant with Rossellini’s child. That was when everything broke open. The American public in 1950 had very little patience for nuance on adultery, and none at all for a woman they had spent a decade worshipping. The mail that came in was extraordinary in its hostility—bag after bag, 10 to 14 enormous sacks of furious letters.
Fan clubs disbanded. Church groups organized boycotts. Newspapers that had praised her for years ran editorials demanding accountability. Then the politicians got involved.
On March 14th, 1950, Senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado took the floor of the United States Senate. He called Bergman one of the most powerful women on Earth and a powerful influence for evil. He called her a horrible example of womanhood, a free love cultist, and a common mistress.
He described Rossellini as a love pirate and a home wrecker, and proposed federal legislation that would license actors and strip those licenses from anyone found guilty of moral turpitude. He demanded she be barred from ever returning to the United States. The Senate did not pass the proposed legislation, but the speech entered the congressional record. The denunciation was official.
Stromboli had opened in American theaters in February 1950, the same month Bergman gave birth to her son, Robin. RKO lost approximately $200,000 on it. In Italy, the film won the Rome Prize. In the United States, The New York Times called it “incredibly feeble, inarticulate, uninspiring, and painfully banal.
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A week after her son was born, Bergman filed for divorce from Lindström under Mexican jurisdiction. She married Rossellini by proxy in May 1950. The custody arrangement gave Lindström primary custody of Pia. Bergman, who had no practical means of fighting a custody battle from abroad, lost her daughter.
Pia was 11 years old. Bergman would not see her again for seven years. The years that followed were not what either Bergman or Rossellini had imagined. Rossellini insisted she work only with him, leaving the most famous actress in the world essentially idle while her reputation in America was still in free fall.
He spent money freely and was unfaithful. They made five more films together between 1952 and 1955, admired by serious critics in Europe but generating almost no money. On June 18th, 1952, Bergman gave birth to twin daughters, Isotta and Isabella Rossellini. The household was already showing the cracks that would split it apart.
Back in America, Ed Sullivan ran a poll on his television show asking whether Bergman should be allowed back into the country. She was, in the language of the government, persona non grata, though she had committed no crime that any law actually defined. She did not apologize. When asked whether she had regrets, she said she had none—only that she regretted the things she had not done.
By the mid-1950s, Rossellini had done to Bergman what he had done to Anna Magnani before her. He had fallen for someone new, a Bengali screenwriter named Sonali Dasgupta. By 1957, he had left her. They divorced that year after seven years of marriage.
Which is precisely when the studio called. Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox decided the moment had arrived to bring her back, over the skepticism of his executives. The film was Anastasia, released in 1956, the story of a woman returning from exile whose identity had been publicly questioned and publicly punished. The casting was not accidental.
Before it opened, Ed Sullivan, the same man who had polled his audience about her, flew to London to interview her. The interview was warm. Anastasia opened to strong reviews and strong box office. The American public, which had spent six years being told that Bergman was a figure of degradation, went to the cinema and watched her disappear into a complex, vulnerable, ultimately triumphant performance.
The cognitive dissonance broke something loose. A woman that awful could not do something that good. At the Academy Awards ceremony in March 1957, Bergman won the Oscar for Best Actress. She was not there to receive it.
Her co-star Cary Grant accepted on her behalf. In 1957, the same year her divorce from Rossellini was finalized, she returned to New York in person to accept the New York Film Critics Circle Award. She walked in, she smiled, and she said she had no regrets. America, cautiously and then warmly, let her back in.
At the 1958 Academy Awards, she appeared on stage as a presenter, her first major public appearance in the United States since the scandal. The audience gave her a standing ovation before she had said a single word. She married Lars Schmidt, a Swedish theatrical producer, that year. They were together until 1975.
She reunited with Pia in 1957. Whatever happened in that reunion was kept private. In 1972, 22 years after Senator Johnson’s denunciation, Senator Charles Percy of Illinois read a formal apology into the congressional record. Bergman wrote back to him, saying her war with America had been over for a long time but the wounds had remained.
His gesture, she said, had healed them forever. She continued working through the 1970s. She won her third Academy Award for Murder on the Orient Express in 1974 and was nominated again for Autumn Sonata in 1978. Her final role was Golda Meir in the television mini-series A Woman Called Golda, filmed in 1982 while she was already seriously ill with breast cancer.
She died on August 29th, 1982, her 67th birthday, at her home in London. The Emmy she won for that performance was accepted posthumously by her daughter Pia. She was ranked fourth on the American Film Institute’s list of the greatest female screen legends. She won three Academy Awards, two Emmy Awards, and a Tony.
She made 50 films across four languages and worked until the month she died. The letter she wrote to Roberto Rossellini changed everything. It cost her seven years in exile, custody of her daughter for the same length of time, the image an industry had built around her, and the early part of three children’s lives. What she got in return was a life that was actually hers.
She said she had no regrets. The image they built around her did not survive the scandal. The scandal did not survive her return.
What survived through all of it was the work.