Once Upon a Time: Ingrid Bergman’s Trip to Homeland


Bergman won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for the Maxwell Anderson play Joan of Lorraine (1947). She also won two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie for The Turn of the Screw (1960), and A Woman Called Golda (1982). In 1974, Bergman discovered she was suffering from breast cancer but continued to work until shortly before her death on her sixty-seventh birthday in 1982. Bergman spoke five languages—Swedish, English, German, Italian, and French—and acted in each.

Ingrid Bergman was born on 29 August 1915 in Stockholm, to a Swedish father, Justus Samuel Bergman, and a German mother, Frieda “Friedel” Henriette Auguste Louise Bergman (née Adler), who was born in Kiel.Her parents married in Hamburg on 13 June 1907. She was named after Princess Ingrid of Sweden. Although she was raised in Sweden, she spent her summers in Germany and spoke fluent German.

Bergman was raised as an only child, as two older siblings had died in infancy before she was born. When she was two and a half years old, her mother died. She learned to create imaginary friends as a child. Justus Bergman had wanted his daughter to become an opera star and had her take voice lessons for three years.He sent her to the Palmgrenska Samskolan, a prestigious girls’ school in Stockholm where Bergman was reportedly neither a good student nor popular.