Written By: Ben Cosgrove
More than most stars of her rare magnitude, Ingrid Bergman was an actress who went her own way. A Hollywood luminary for decades, from the Thirties well into the Seventies, the Swedish-born beauty acted in films that not only entertained millions but that also satisfied her own, personal need to constantly test and broaden the limits of her craft.
In 1943, for example, she told LIFE magazine, “I am an actress and I am interested in acting, not in making money.” Coming from almost anyone else in her position, that might sound like a public relations platitude. But even at that relatively early point in her career, Bergman had already proven herself a singularly versatile artist, with solid and even iconic performances in films ranging from psychological thrillers (Rage in Heaven) to horror (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) to romance (Intermezzo) to arguably the very greatest of all American movies, the 1942 Best Picture Oscar winner, Casablanca.
Bergman won three acting Oscars during her long career (two for Best Actress, in Gaslight and Anastasia, and one for Best Supporting Actress for her role in 1974’s star-studded Murder on the Orient Express), and was nominated four more times. She also won Emmys, a Tony, Golden Globe and New York Film Critics Circle awards in other words, she proved again and again that she could act as well as star in almost any role, on film, stage and the small screen.
And for pretty much all of those years that she lit up the screen and the stage with her combustible mix of intellect, emotional honesty and sensuality, LIFE magazine covered Bergman’s life and her career. When she was the “hot new thing” in Hollywood (after making a name for herself in her native Sweden in the 1930s), LIFE raved about the “new brand of charm” she brought to the American screen. When, in 1946, she starred on Broadway in Maxwell Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine (for which she won her only Tony), LIFE referred to her deserved “enormous reputation” as Hollywood’s “undisputed queen.” When her career took a hit in the States after she left her husband and daughter, Pia, to live with and eventually marry the great Italian director Roberto Rossellini shocking and angering her American fans who had, simplistically, come to view her as something like a saint LIFE sympathetically covered her life and her work in Europe.
And when, years later, she was again embraced and beloved by fans who “forgave” her her trespasses, and flocked to see her in films like Orient Express and Autumn Sonata and watched, in the millions, her Emmy and Golden Globe-winning turn in the Golda Meir television biopic, A Woman Called Golda, LIFE celebrated her return to America’s good graces.
Here, on the anniversary of both her birth and her death she was born Aug. 29, 1915, and died Aug. 29, 1982, at a too-young 67 after a long battle with breast cancer LIFE.com presents pictures of the one and only Ingrid Bergman as she appeared in LIFE through the years.
Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Ingrid Bergman in 1941
Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock images
Ingrid Bergman in 1943, around the time she starred in For Whom The Bell Tolls.
John Florea/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock images
Ingrid Bergman in 1943
John Florea/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock images
Ingrid Bergman with the painter Alexander Brook, 1944.
John Florea/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock images
Ingrid Bergman as Maria in the movie For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1944.
John Florea/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock images
Ingrid Bergman in 1945 with her Best Actress Academy Award for Gaslight.
Walter Sanders/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock images
Ingrid Bergman in 1945
John Florea/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock images
Ingrid Bergman in the film Arch of Triumph
George Lacks/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock images
Ingrid Bergman in the film Arch of Triumph
Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock images
Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc praying for guidance during a scene from the Broadway production of Maxwell Anderson’s 1946 play, Joan of Lorraine, for which Bergman won a Tony.
Gjon Mili /Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock images
Ingrid Bergman dresses as Joan of Arc in the Broadway production of Maxwell Anderson’s 1946 play, Joan of Lorraine, for which Bergman won a Tony.
Allan Grant/Life Pciture Collection/Shutterstock images
Ingrid Bergman as Joan in the 1948 movie, Joan of Arc.
Loomis Dean/Life Pciture Collection/Shutterstock images
Ingrid Bergman stands on a street as village women stare at her during filming of the movie “Stromboli” on the Italian island of Stromboli, 1949.
Gordon Parks/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock images
Ingrid Bergman during filming of the movie “Stromboli” on the Italian island of Stromboli, 1949.
Gordon Parks/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock images
Ingrid Bergman during filming of the movie “Stromboli,” on the Italian island of Stromboli, 1949.
Gordon Parks/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock images
Ingrid Bergman acting in a scene from the 1956 Jean Renoir film, ‘Elena et les Hommes.”
Thomas McAvoy/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock images
Ingrid Bergman plays with a child actor between scenes of the taping of John Frankenheimer’s 1959 TV movie, The Turn of the Screw, for which she won an Emmy.
Gordon Parks/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock images
Ingrid Bergman in a special 1961 play on CBS, Twenty Four Hours in a Woman’s Life.
Leonard McCombe/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock images
Absorbed in conversation, 52-year-old Ingrid Bergman rides through Los Angeles on her way to the theater where she’ll perform in Eugene O’Neill’s play, More Stately Mansions, in 1967.
Bill Ray/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock images
