Part 2: Notorious

4. Casablanca - Michael Curtiz (1942)
5. Spellbound - Alfred Hitchcock (1945)
6. Notorious - Alfred Hitchcock (1946)

Notorious. In 1950, Ingrid Bergman was publicly denounced on the floor of the US Senate. Bergman was denounced by senator Edwin C. Johnson who referred to her as “a horrible example of womanhood and a powerful influence for evil.” The result: Bergman fled Hollywood, not to return until years later. Her denouncement came because of her affair with Italian film maker Roberto Rossellini and their out of wedlock child. Who was this woman who won the hearts and minds of America only to be denounced as notorious in private as she was on the screen?

Born August 29th, 1915, in Stockholm, Sweden; Bergman knew from a young age that she was destined for greatness. Her father, an artist himself, recorded her every birthday and hoped she would one day become an opera singer. Sadly, though, tragedy came quickly for young Ingrid; her mother died when she was only three years old and her father ten years later, leaving Bergman an orphan by the age of thirteen. By the age of seventeen she had already been accepted in Stockholm’s prestigious Royal Dramatic Theatre School and within a year of her acceptance left to start acting in films with a Swedish studio. By 1939, the infamous Hollywood producer David O. Selznick swept her off to America to star in a film called Intermezzo: A Love Story (1939); an American remake of the Swedish Intermezzo (1936) which she had starred in only a few years before. From that point on, Ingrid was a star.

Throughout the 1940’s Bergman was to star in some of the greatest films of the decade: the incomparable Casa Blanca (1942), Alfred Hitchcock’s suspenseful masterpieces Spellbound (1945) and Notorious (1946). Through the 1940’s she was nominated four times for Best Actress at the Academy Awards and was even awarded it once for her role in George Cukor’s Gaslight (1945).

What was it about her that attracted all of America so much? How did this half-Swedish half-German girl win over America so thoroughly at a time when America was at war with Germany? The answer can only be found in watching her films, appreciating her unmistakable charm and almost kinetic allure on the screen. The 1940’s are home to an almost ceaseless roll of iconic and glamourous female starlets—Joan Fontaine, Lauren Bacall, Gloria Grahame—and yet, compared to her female contemporaries, none could quite match that unmistakable charm which made Ingrid Bergman notorious.

—Devon Gallant