Ingrid Bergman, Her Early Career

Ingrid Bergman is something of an enigma, even if she is a great actress.  She was crucially unique and her own chosen self: tall, 'natural' looking, fluent in English yet unmistakably Swedish in her voice, an actress who always strove to be a 'true' woman. There was a time in the early and mid-1940 's when Bergman commanded a kind of love in America that has been hardly ever matched. In turn, it was the strength of that affection that animated the 'scandal' when she behaved like an impetuous and ambitious actress instead of a saint. Is she an example of the liberated woman, exercising her freedom even to the brink of sef-destruction? Or is she a curiously empty life force dependent on the changing personalities of the several men in her life? Was she one of the film world's martyrs to publicity, or did she nurse a special aptitude for suffering?