Ingrid Bergman

Ingrid Bergman was born on 29 August 1915 in Stockholm, Sweden, to a Swedish father, Justus Samuel Bergman, and a German mother, Frieda Henriette Auguste Louise Bergman, née Adler, who was born in Kiel. Her parents had married in Hamburg on 13 June 1907. Bergman was named after Princess Ingrid of Sweden and, though raised in Sweden, spent her summers in Germany and spoke fluent German from childhood. Two older siblings had died in infancy before her birth, leaving her an only child. Her mother died when Bergman was two and a half years old, and her father, a photographer who had hoped she would become an opera star and arranged voice lessons for her, died of stomach cancer in 1929 when she was approximately fourteen. Following his death, she went to live with her paternal aunt Ellen, who died of heart disease six months later, after which she lived with her paternal uncle Otto and his wife Hulda.

Bergman received a scholarship to the Royal Dramatic Training Academy in Stockholm, the same institution where Greta Garbo had earlier studied. After only a few months she was cast in a stage production, departing from the school's standard requirement that students complete three years before taking roles. She left the academy after one year to work in films full-time with Swedish studio Svensk Filmindustri. Her first speaking role came in Munkbrogreven in 1935, and she went on to appear in a series of Swedish productions under director Gustaf Molander, including Ocean Breakers, Swedenhielms, Walpurgis Night, and Intermezzo, the last of which Molander credited entirely to Bergman's own talent for its success. She also appeared in On the Sunny Side and Only One Night before starring in En kvinnas ansikte, a role created specifically for her in which she played against type as a bitter, scarred leader of a blackmail gang.

Her introduction to American audiences came with the English-language remake of Intermezzo in 1939. She went on to star in Casablanca in 1942, playing Ilsa Lund, and delivered a series of acclaimed performances throughout the 1940s in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Gaslight, The Bells of St. Mary's, and Joan of Arc, each of which earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She won that award for her performance in Gaslight. During the same decade she made three films with director Alfred Hitchcock: Spellbound, Notorious, and Under Capricorn. In 1950, she starred in Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli, and the revelation of her affair with Rossellini, along with her pregnancy before their marriage, created a public scandal in the United States that led her to remain in Europe for several years. During that period she appeared in Rossellini's Europa '51, for which she received the Volpi Cup for Best Actress, and in Journey to Italy. She later returned to Hollywood and earned Academy Awards for Anastasia in 1956 and Murder on the Orient Express in 1974, and received a sixth Best Actress nomination for Autumn Sonata in 1978. She also appeared in Indiscreet and Cactus Flower during this period.

Bergman's Broadway career extended from 1940 to 1975. She appeared in Liliom and starred in More Stately Mansions, Captain Brassbound's Conversion, and The Constant Wife. Her Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play came in 1947 for her performance in the Maxwell Anderson play Joan of Lorraine. That honor, combined with her three Academy Awards and two Primetime Emmy Awards — the latter for The Turn of the Screw in 1960 and A Woman Called Golda in 1982 — made her the youngest performer at the time to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her the fourth-greatest female screen legend of Classic Hollywood Cinema.

Bergman spoke five languages — Swedish, English, German, Italian, and French — and performed professionally in each. In 1974, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and continued working until shortly before her death. She died on 29 August 1982, her sixty-seventh birthday.