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> The abundance, in Hollywood, of women who are much more like each other than they are like Miss Bergman.
> Miss Bergman's particular kind of beauty. By external standards it is unremarkable. What makes it hard to compete with is that, coming from within, it is the beauty of an individual.
> The individual herself, who happens to be an uncommonly well-balanced and charming one.
Miss Bergman was an only child. Her mother died when she was three. Her father, a big, merry, popular photographer-artist, who liked to flex his basso in the bathtub, hoped his daughter would become an opera star, and early accustomed her to the enjoyment of routines before cameras. Ingrid was deeply attached to her father, but even before he died, when she was 13, she was much alone and without playmates. As soon as she learned to walk, and about as naturally, she learned her famous self-sufficiency and intactness. And she learned the thing that made it possible and preferable—her total absorption in acting. It began with rigging herself in her mother's old dresses. It went on with spouting poetry—any old poetry so long as it gave her histrionic impulses a canter. Later, at boarding school, though she was a' prize winner at declamation (see cut, p. 60), her tall, sensitive awkwardness increased her isolation.
Such solitude, which destroys some people, strengthens others. It seems to have strengthened her.
Born into a moderately well-to-do family of the upper middle class, Ingrid Bergman is, in addition, a European gentlewoman, who has lived less among the stultified members of her class than among the cultivated, the flexible, the gifted and the gay. As such, in Europe, she would be no more than an idealization of an attractive, not uncommon type. As such, in the U.S., she is as noticeable as a Negro President.
Something Rare. Even without talent, Miss Bergman would bring something rare to U.S. films. To cite one single asset which is hers almost exclusively, her photographed flesh looks neither like a Crane fixtures ad nor sponge rubber nor the combined efforts of a fashionable portraitist and a rural mortician; it looks like flesh. Many people, since life must go on, find this attractive, even when it surprises them to see it on the screen. The same thing goes for her poise, sincerity, reticence, sensitiveness and charm.
Also for talent, of which Miss Bergman has a lot. And she knows how to use it. Hollywood's talented people have developed marvelous skill in a tradition as rigid and elaborate as Javanese dancing, and almost as remote from life. Miss Bergman comes of a tradition in which an interest in realism, in the huge and various wealth of actual life, is as natural to a good actress as to a good novelist.