A Woman’s Voice: Ingrid Bergman in Five Languages

Bergman was born to a German mother and a Swedish father, and she learned Swedish and German at school and some French before going into films at the age of nineteen in the comedy The Count of the Old Town (1935), where she is green and self-conscious. But she learned fast under the tutelage of Gustaf Molander, who directed her in six films in Sweden in the 1930s, plus a short in the omnibus picture Stimulantia in 1967. Molander often delights in presenting Bergman in “isn’t she beautiful?” shots where she is posed next to flowers or a statue or an ornate staircase so that her loveliness is reinforced by the objects around her, and so her vocal delivery takes a backseat to visual presentation.

But Bergman’s voice throbs and rides up and down the scale with abandon in Molander’s Intermezzo (1936), in which she offers up her youthfully lyric enthusiasm to a famous violinist played by Gosta Ekman, an actor she admired and loved. Romantic material like this was the ideal setting for Bergman, far more so than the sophisticated comedy of Molander’s Dollar (1938), where she has some trouble with the quickness of the pace and the overall tone. Yet there is a moment in this movie where she stops speaking Swedish and asks, “Ladies and gentlemen, can I have a cup of tea?” in English—with an American accent—to send up an American character in the film, and the effect is exciting because the Bergman of the 1940s jumps out at us momentarily.

Bergman went to Nazi-era Germany to make a little-seen working girl comedy called The Four Companions (1938), and she seems exceptionally ill-tempered in that movie speaking the more strenuous language. In scenes where her character is supposed to be annoyed, Bergman’s fury goes well beyond the scope of the role she is playing, and it does feel like she knows she has made a mistake in coming to this country at this time. Sixteen years later, Bergman went to Munich to make her last film with her second husband, Roberto Rossellini, which is called Angst (1954) in its German-language edition, and in this performance she is void of all creative energy, which is funneled directly to the English-language version called Fear. So playing in German brought out only the worst for Bergman.

Back in Sweden she reached a new level of imagination and emotional identification as a performer for Molander in A Woman’s Face (1938), as a scarred blackmailer. This was the point when her work had fully matured, and this is especially so in June Night (1940), a key Swedish Bergman film that understands her enigmatic, questing nature better than just about any other movie she ever made. In June Night she is a free spirit and a woman of scandal, a great beauty open to much interpretation and projection by the people around her. Her character is alive here to emotions of resentment, mortification, and fear, yet dreamily ruthless enough to betray a very supportive female friend without any qualms.

It can be difficult but not impossible to judge vocal effects in acting when you do not know the language in which the actor is working, but it seems clear that Bergman uses Swedish in a heightened way in her 1930s movies. Her daughter Pia Lindstrom thought that Bergman was so effective in English in the 1940s because “Swedish is so open in the throat,” with cadences that move up and then down very fast. Think of her line readings in the 1940s movies that made Bergman the most beloved female star in Hollywood of that time and it is clear that her musical way with English is part of what made her so magical. In Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), when she says, “I’m liable to blow up the Panama Canal any minute now,” the line comes out like a roller-coaster ride, with the words “Panama Canal” so tightly held together that “any minute now” is like the steepest fast plunge downward.