How Ingrid Bergman Changed Hollywood 75 Years Ago Today

Casablanca

A storm of conflicting emotions plays across actress Ingrid Bergman’s face during the first heartrending notes of “As Time Goes By” in Casablanca—the Academy Award–winning movie that opened on Thanksgiving Day, 75 years ago. Bergman, playing the wife of an idealistic Czech freedom fighter caught in a love triangle with a cynical American nightclub owner (Humphrey Bogart), deftly uses her expressive lightly lined eyes and naturally sculpted brows to help project both vulnerability and courage amid a growing refugee crisis in WWII-era Morocco. Yet, in her autobiography, My Story, the Swedish actress revealed she had to fight for that all-natural look, flatly refusing to undergo the typical starlet treatment that included changing one’s hair, brows, name, and anything else deemed “necessary” for film work.

In the late 1930s, Bergman arrived in Hollywood with one suitcase and no makeup kit, prompting producer David Selznick’s wife, Irene, to ask, incredulously, “You mean you have nothing on your face?” She didn’t. When the actress met the filmmaker (in the midst of producing Gone With the Wind), he immediately sized her up, commenting, “Your eyebrows are too thick, and your teeth are no good, and there are lots of other things . . . I’ll take you to the makeup department in the morning.”

Bergman immediately fought back. “I think you’ve made a big mistake,” she said to the man who requested she come to Hollywood after spotting her in a promising Swedish film. “You shouldn’t have bought the pig in the sack. I thought you saw me in the movie Intermezzo and liked me, and sent [agent] Kay Brown across Sweden to get me. Now you’ve seen me, you want to change everything. So I’d rather not do the movie . . . I’ll take the next train and go back home.

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