Notorious : Life of Ingrid Bergman

Revealing and richly informative account of the dramatic life of one of the century's most famous screen actresses, Ingrid Bergman (1915-82), a controversial woman whose affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini led to her being banned from the USA for seven years.Ingrid Bergman was the daughter of a Swedish father and German mother, who spent part of the 1930s in the German film industry. Her success in the Swedish film `Intermezzo' (1936), where she played a concert pianist, led to her arrival in Hollywood in 1939, where she starred in `Casablanca', three of Hitchcock's films (`Notorious', `Spellbound' and `Under Capricorn'), `Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' (with Spencer Tracy), `Gaslight', `The Bells of St Mary's', `For Whom the Bell Tolls', etc.Her roles, like her life, alternated between the saintly and the saucy, the innocent and the dissolute. At first America fell in love with her: she was uncommonly fresh, recognisably human, and (it seemed) a happily domesticated wife and mother. However, as Spoto shows, nothing was ever tame about Ingrid; her love affairs were intense, and her relationship with Rossellini scandalised America.Ingrid Bergman's work and life comprise a romantic drama that rivals the biographies of Isadora Duncan, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and Jacqueline Kennedy. In forty-nine feature films, nine plays and countless public appearances, she enchanted millions over a period of five decades.

Paperback. English.Harpercollins. 1998. Good Condition.