Ingrid Bergman was for my sixpence, the greatest film actress there ever was.  She was a natural, right from the start.  She loved the camera; it held no fears for her.  Maybe it was because she enjoyed posing for her photographer father, Julius, so much.  He once commented that one of the children he photographed would some day become famous.  Little did he know that this would be his beloved Ingrid. 

It was perhaps the tragedies of her early life that gave Ingrid that look in the eyes, that orphan appeal for love, that came straight through the camera and said ‘Hold me, look after me.  I love only you and I need you so badly!   It was irresistable!   

Ingrid was deeply affected by the story of  her parents romance. Her beautiful mother, Friedel, had fallen in love with Julius at the age of 15 when she saw him sketching in the park but had to wait seven years before her parents considered his prospects sufficient to look after daughter.  The marriage was blissfully happy, tinged only with a wistful sadness when Frieda’s first two children died in infancy.  Then Ingrid arrived and was adored by both her parents, but just two years later Freida died.  Ingrid had little recollection of her mother, and was loved and cherished by her father, but when she was  just 12, her beloved father died of stomach cancer.  At the time she consoled herself by reading  Friedel’s love letters to Julius during their long period of waiting.  This may well have implanted the longing for romantic love that shines through the eyes in all her screen parts. 

The eyes have it.  Ingrid was not an iconic beauty, she was tall, had slightly prominent teeth , refused to pluck her full eyebrows, but she looked healthy, had flawless skin and that look.  Always the look!  And she was a chum, the girl next door you could lark about with.  She had a mischievous penchant for practical jokes.   

After her father died, Ingrid was looked after by aunts and uncles, who deeply opposed her  ambitions to be an actress, but relented after exacting a promise that if she failed the auditions for the Royal Stockholm Theatre at her first attempt she would abandon all notions of the stage as a career.  She didn’t.  She was a natural.  Film roles followed and by the age of 21 she was a celebrity.  

 Over the next ten years she moved to Hollywood and made a sequence of films.  She was an instant box office success.  People loved her natural beauty, her innocence, her girlishness, her intelligence, her sense of fun.  But Ingrid was a young woman who knew what she wanted and how to get it.  She was a bird with balls.  She would deliberately take on the difficult roles which didn’t always cast her in the best light.  She loved acting.  She loved the challenge and the celebrity.  She loved being loved.

But in real life she was always looking for that special romance, that perfect bond of intimacy, that constant warmth of feeling;  the man who would adore her, cherish her and keep her safe enough to pursue her ambitions.  She wanted the consistency of a deeply intimate relationship to give her the confidence to risk the excitement of the challenge of a new part.  The two were not always compatible and her men did not necessarily want to play the house husband to the famous actress. 

She married Petter Lindstrom, who was a dentist, when she was just 22.  He was her first long term relationship and was somewhat older – maybe that was part of the attraction for her;  Petter could look after her.  But he was a bit cool and distant and tried to curb her exuberance, control her behaviour, watch her weight.   He didn’t like the way she frowned and somewhat  jealous of her relationships with her leading men, although she took her responsibities as wife and mother very seriously and was not unfaithful.   By 1943, at the height of her fame, she suggested to Petter they might get divorced.  There was nobody else but the marriage had rigidified and her career had left it behind.    

Then she met the mercurial maverick director, Roberto Rossellini.  It was love at first sight.  He was married with two children, she with one.  There were difficulties getting divorces.  People were scandalised when she moved to Rome and began living openly with Rossellini and so soon obviously pregnant.   She got terrible letters. Offers of parts in America dried up overnight.  Besides, Rosselini made it clear that he wouldn’t allow her to go back to America or to work for any other director but him.  Their professional association arrested both their careers.  Their affair turned her from goddess to whore overnight.   She needed to draw on great reserves of courage to live through the scandal of her affair and marriage to Rosellini, and the separation from her daughter, Pia and from Petter, whom she still needed as a friend and helpmate.  But she was in love and at times of her greatest loneliness and fear, she could always escape into her role in the play.    

She had three children very quickly by Rosselini, Robin and the twins, Isabella and Ingrid Isotto,  but her relationship with Rosselino was becoming difficult.  He worked like an artist, he wasn’t disciplined.  He used amateurs and never knew the script in advance, expecting the actors to improvise. He would suddenly leave the set and retire to his bed for days.  Ingrid was a professional, she needed consistency.  He gave her the kind of controlling inconsistency where only he knew the answers, which  came to him in a flash of inspiration.  She longed to work with other directors, but Ingrid was his property.   Eventually after seven years, he went on an extended project to India.  He was away a year and returned with his own Indian family. 

Ingrid’s subsequent marriage with the Swedish producer, Lars Schmidt went much the same way.  She was working again, rebuilding her career and may have neglected the marriage a bit, taken Lars for granted.  There was an element of self destruct in Ingrid.  When she had the love she craved, the consistency she needed, she became insecure and bored and needed to escape into another role.  She couldn’t hang on to the marriage.  It sort of drifted away.  Ingrid was always comfortable with acting.  It was life that made her nervous.

 ‘The greatest loneliness’, she once said, ‘was the loss of intimacy with someone you had once been close to, of being with them and finding you have lost the ability to connect.’ 

Ingrid ignored the lump in her breast at first  because she was in a play and about to start a new film.  By the time she got it treated, it had spread, but she carried on acting, often in great pain.  Her last project was a  portrayal  of Golda Meir; she kept her grossly swollen arm elevated all night so she could do the scene where she was required to lift both arms up in a typical Golda Meir gesture – she was that professional.  As she got older she became more forthright, if she didn’t want to do something, she didn’t.   She had no need of pretences any more.

Impulsive, amusing, needy, sentimental,  though at the same time kind and generous and loyal to her friends,  Ingrid was never the celebrity; she could not be aloof.  She needed to connect to people too much.  But there was always something of the orphan about her, clinging on to her previous emotional securities, meaningful objects, letters, photographs, friends and dreams.   She was the beautiful empty princess.  ‘My life was always concerned with finding and holding on to love,’ she commented towards the end.  She never stopped looking for the quality of intimacy her parents had enjoyed but had never realised that their relationship too would have transformed into something more mundane had it lasted.  Better for us, the millions who have fallen in love with the image that Ingrid expressed,  that it didn’t.   

 Ingrid Bergman died of breast cancer in 1982 on her 67^th birthday.  The English edition of Charlotte Chandler’s biography ‘Ingrid’ was published by Simon and Schuster in 2007.

Related posts:

1. Charmed! The irresistable attractions of Violet Gordon Woodhouse. Some women just have it, that magic; the ability to...
2. Haunted! ‘Trauma’ and McGrath’s ghosts. Charlie is a psychiatrist, an expert on trauma. His marriage...
3. Show! Don’t tell! An appraisal of The Reader. Show! Don’t tell!  Let the reader decide why the characters...

‘Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter.

 Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.’

                                              Samuel Beckett

Don’t give up! Learn from your mistakes. Do better next time. Remember Robert Bruce and the spider, Alfred and the cakes.  Just pick yourself up, dust yourself down and start all over again.  That seems be the message of Beckett’s aphorism.  

Of course, the greater the prize, the greater the chance of failure.  If only one in a hundred are going to succeed, then the odds are stacked against you.  Failure is not only likely but valuable. So give yourself a break.  Don’t get so hung up on failure.   Just learn from your mistakes and do better next time. 

Suppose you enter a poem or a short story for a literature prize and you don’t short listed, be phlegmatic, reflect on the experience and try again.  Lower your sites a little.  The next time you will do it better.  And maybe after three of four attempts, your poem might be commended and in the time of failure you may amass a sufficient body of work to secure a publishing deal.  Look at the number of rejections J.K. Rowling had before Harry Potter was accepted.  Did she give up?  No!  She continued to go to the same Edinburgh café and keep writing.   

Science is 99% failure.  Grant applications are rarely accepted first time round.  Most papers submitted to scientific journals are rejected by the reviewers.  New drugs are almost invariably turned down by the regulatory authorities.  But most scientists don’t give up.  They study the reviewers comments, make the necessary adjustments to their manuscript,  mount a considered rebuttal to those remarks they don’t agree with and resubmit.  Maybe there was a fatal flaw in their argument all along and they have to withdraw, but the next time they send in a paper, it will be so  much better.  And eventually their perseverance will pay off.   

This same principle applies to all aspects of life; job applications, passing your driving test, learning IT skills, house or garden design, managing finance, bringing up children.  Parents are often more relaxed with their second child, who benefits from the mistakes they made with their elder brother or sister. 

And of course, it applies in spades to personal relationships.  You meet the love of your life; the one, who has the looks, wit, charm and what’s more seems to love you too.  Yet, you make a mess of it.  The greater the desire, the greater the fear, and like a slip fielder, you bungle the catch.  But what do you do; give up all hope; go into terminal decline?  Hopefully not!  You learn, albeit sadly.  You might question your own projections, acknowledge the confusion of love and possession, even gain a little wisdom, redirect your energies, but above all realise that life can still offer joy and happiness.              

The sporting metaphor is so apt.  How much we all agonised over Tim Henman’s battles with himself, which only intensified as the prize of a Wimbledon grand slam got within reach.  But Tim not only failed better and better, reaching the semi-finals four times, but he failed magnificently.  What drama!  What courage! What a spectacle! 

And how many of us thought the Ashes series was dead and buried after the rout at Headingly, yet the same England team came back and secured the prized urn at The Oval just two weeks later.  

Success is never a good thing if it is too easy.  Easy success can breed complacency;  a sense of entitlement that can make the shock of failure and rejection too much to bear. Look at the fragility of George Best, Paul Gasgoine, Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears and  Jade Goody.  Celebrity that is not built on a solid foundation of hard work and harder personal experience can all too easily collapse with quite devastating consequences.   

On the other hand, how many successful people built their lives from the ashes of failure.  Sir Richard Bransom left school at 15; so did Alexander Graham Bell.  Winston Churchill was right at the bottom of his year at Harrow.  John Major, John Humphreys, James Callaghan and Alan Sugar never went to University.  Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard. Damien Hirst got an E in A level Art.  John Lennon failed all his O levels.  The examples of successful failures are so legion that it can seems that failure is a necessary prerequisite of success, providing the grit in the oyster,  the frustration, disappointment and hunger that can motivate a person to fail better or even succeed.        

The important thing is to forgive yourself, acknowledge your mistakes, adjust and try again.  Reflect but don’t over-analyse.  Learn but don’t agonise. Failure doesn’t have to be a fatal character flaw.  You are not defined by your success or your failure.  On the contrary,  failure is part of the human condition. Understand the mechanics of your errors and then let them go.  That way you will feel better.

This article was stimulated by a conversation I had with the psychoanalytical psychotherapist, Dr Alan Lidmila.   

Related posts:

1. When the dream fades, kill it off! Frank and April Wheeler had it all.  They were a...
2. How you make me feel; projection and its identification. Why do we trust some people and not others?  Why...
3. Beauty with Balls; an appreciation of Ingrid Bergman I think I was in love with her from the...