Dolores del Río
Dolores del Río was a Mexican actress. She was the first major female Latin American crossover star in Hollywood, with an outstanding career in American films in the 1920s and 1930s, she was considered one of the more important female figures of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. Del Río is remembered as one of the most beautiful faces of the cinema in her time, her long and varied career spanned silent film, sound film, television and radio. After being discovered in Mexico by the filmmaker Edwin Carewe, she began her film career in 1925, she had roles in a series of successful silent films like What Price Glory?, Resurrection and Ramona. During this period she came to be considered a sort of feminine version of Rudolph Valentino, a "female Latin Lover". With the advent of sound, she acted in films that included Bird of Paradise, Flying Down to Rio, Madame Du Barry and Journey into Fear. In the early 1940s, when her Hollywood career began to decline, del Río returned to Mexico and joined the Mexican film industry, which at that time was at its peak.
When del Río returned to her native country, she became one of the more important promoters and stars of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. A series of films, including Wild Flower, María Candelaria, Las Abandonadas and The Unloved Woman, are considered classic masterpieces and helped boost Mexican cinema worldwide. Del Río remained active in Mexican films throughout the 1950s, she worked in Argentina and Spain. In 1960 she returned to Hollywood. During the next years she appeared in American films. From the late 1950s until the early 1970s she successfully ventured into theater in Mexico and appeared in some American television series. María de los Dolores Asúnsolo y López-Negrete was born in Durango City, Mexico on 3 August 1904, her parents were Jesus Leonardo Asúnsolo Jacques, son of wealthy farmers and director of the Bank of Durango, Antonia López-Negrete, belonging to one of the richest families in the country, whose lineage went back to Spain and the viceregal nobility. Antonia was the daughter of Agustín López-Negrete, the hacienda owner, the first man killed by Doroteo Arango known as Pancho Villa.
Her parents were members of the Mexican aristocracy. On her mother's side, she was a cousin of the filmmaker Julio Bracho and of actors Ramón Novarro and Andrea Palma. On her father's side, she was a cousin of the Mexican sculptor Ignacio Asúnsolo and the social activist María Asúnsolo, her family lost all its assets during the Mexican Revolution. Durango aristocratic families were threatened by the insurrection that Pancho Villa was leading in the region; the Asúnsolo family decided to escape. Dolores's father decided to escape to the United States, while she and her mother fled to Mexico City in a train, disguised as peasants. In 1912, the Asúnsolo family reunited in Mexico City, they had regained their social position and lived under the protection of then-president Francisco I. Madero, a cousin of Doña Antonia. For a family of their social status, it was important that their daughter should receive a Catholic education. Dolores attended the College Collège Français de Saint-Joseph, run by French nuns and located in Mexico City.
In 1919, her mother took her to a performance of the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, whose interpretation influenced her to become a dancer. She confirmed her decision when she witnessed the performances of Antonia Mercé "La Argentina", she persuaded her mother to allow her to take dance lessons with the respected teacher Felipita Lopez. However, she suffered from great insecurity and felt like an "ugly duckling", her mother commissioned the renowned painter Alfredo Ramos Martínez to paint a portrait of her daughter. The portrait helped her overcome her insecurities. In 1921, aged 16 or 17, Dolores was invited by a group of Mexican women to dance in a party to benefit a local hospital in the Teatro Esperanza Iris. At this party, she met son of a wealthy family. Jaime had spent some time in Europe. After a two-month courtship, the couple wed on 11 April 1921, he was 34 years old. Their honeymoon in Europe lasted two years. Jaime maintained close ties with European aristocratic circles. In Spain Dolores danced again in a charity show for wounded soldiers in the battle of Melilla.
The monarchs of Spain, Alfonso XIII and Victoria Eugenie, thanked her and the queen gave her a photograph. In 1924, the couple returned to Mexico, they decided to live on Jaime's country estate. But after the cotton market suffered a precipitous fall, the couple was on the verge of ruin. At the same time Dolores discovered, she suffered a miscarriage and her doctor informed her that she should never again become pregnant, at risk of losing her life. The couple decided to settle in Mexico City. In early 1925, Dolores met the American filmmaker Edwin Carewe, an influential director at the First National studio, in Mexico for the wedding of actors Bert Lytell and Claire Windsor. Carewe was fascinated by Dolores and managed to be invited to her home by the artist Adolfo Best Maugard. In the evening Dolores danced and her husband accompanied her on the piano. Carewe was determined to have her, so he invited th
Ronald Colman
Ronald Charles Colman was an English-born actor, starting his career in theatre and silent film in his native country, before emigrating to the United States, having a successful Hollywood film career, he was most popular during the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s. He received Oscar nominations for Bulldog Drummond and Random Harvest. Colman starred in several classic films, including A Tale of Two Cities, Lost Horizon and The Prisoner of Zenda, he played the starring role in the Technicolor classic Kismet, with Marlene Dietrich, nominated for four Academy Awards. In 1947, he won an Academy Award for Best Actor and Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for the film A Double Life. Colman was an inaugural recipient to be given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for his work in motion pictures, he was awarded a second star for his television work. Ronald Charles Colman was born in Richmond, England, the second son and fourth child of Charles Colman, a silk merchant, his wife Marjory Read Fraser, his siblings comprised Eric and Marjorie.
He was educated at boarding school in Littlehampton, where he discovered that he enjoyed acting, despite his shyness. He intended to study engineering at Cambridge, but his father's sudden death from pneumonia in 1907 made it financially impossible, he became a well-known amateur actor and was a member of the West Middlesex Dramatic Society in 1908–09. He made his first appearance on the professional stage in 1914. While working as a clerk at the British Steamship Company in the City of London, he joined the London Scottish Regiment in 1909 as a Territorial Army soldier, on being mobilised at the outbreak of the First World War, crossed the English Channel to France in September 1914 to take part in the fighting on the Western Front. On 31 October 1914, at the Battle of Messines, Colman was wounded by shrapnel in his ankle, which gave him a limp that he would attempt to hide throughout the rest of his acting career; as a consequence, he was invalided out of the British Army in 1915. His fellow Hollywood actors Claude Rains, Herbert Marshall, Cedric Hardwicke and Basil Rathbone all saw service with the London Scottish in the war.
Colman had sufficiently recovered from wartime injuries to appear at the London Coliseum on 19 June 1916, as Rahmat Sheikh in The Maharani of Arakan, with Lena Ashwell. At the same theatre the following year he appeared in Eugène Brieux's Damaged Goods. At the Ambassadors Theatre in February 1918, he played George Lubin in The Little Brother. During 1918, he toured as David Goldsmith in The Bubble. In 1920, Colman went to America and toured with Robert Warwick in The Dauntless Three, subsequently toured with Fay Bainter in East is West, he married his first wife, Thelma Raye, in 1920: they divorced in 1934. At the Booth Theatre in New York in January 1921, he played the Temple Priest in William Archer's play The Green Goddess. With George Arliss at the 39th Street Theatre in August 1921 he appeared as Charles in The Nightcap. In September 1922, he had great success as Alain Sergyll at the Empire Theatre in La Tendresse. Colman had first appeared in films in Britain in 1917 and 1919 for director Cecil Hepworth, subsequently with the old Broadwest Film Company in Snow in the Desert.
While appearing on stage in New York in La Tendresse, Director Henry King saw him and engaged him as the leading man in the 1923 film The White Sister, opposite Lillian Gish. He was an immediate success. Thereafter, Colman abandoned the stage for film, he became a popular silent film star in both romantic and adventure films, among them The Dark Angel, Stella Dallas, Beau Geste and The Winning of Barbara Worth. His dark hair and eyes and his athletic and riding ability led reviewers to describe him as a "Valentino type", he was cast in similar, exotic roles. Towards the end of the silent era, Colman was teamed with Hungarian actress Vilma Bánky under Samuel Goldwyn. Although he was a huge success in silent films, he was unable to capitalise on one of his chief assets until the advent of the talking picture, "his beautifully modulated and cultured voice." Also described as "a bewitching, finely-modulated, resonant voice." Colman was viewed as a suave English gentleman, whose voice embodied chivalry and mirrored the image of a "Stereotypical English gentleman."
Commenting on Colman's appeal, English film critic David Shipman stated that Colman was "'the dream lover - calm, trustworthy. Although he was a lithe figure in adventure stories, his glamour -, genuine - came from his respectability, he thereafter appeared in a number of notable films: Raffles in 1930, The Masquerader in 1933, Clive of India and A Tale of Two Cities in 1935, Under Two Flags, The Prisoner of Zenda and Lost Horizon in 1937, If I Were King in 1938 and Random Harvest and The Talk of the Town in 1942. He won the Best Actor Oscar in 1948 for A Double Life, he next starred in 1950's Champagne for Caesar. At the time of his death, Colman was contracted by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for the lead role in Village of the Damned. However, Colman died and the film became a British production starring George Sanders, who married Colman's widow, Benit
Drama
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, mime, etc, performed in a theatre, or on radio or television. Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been contrasted with the epic and the lyrical modes since Aristotle's Poetics —the earliest work of dramatic theory; the term "drama" comes from a Greek word meaning "action", derived from "I do". The two masks associated with drama represent the traditional generic division between comedy and tragedy. In English, the word "play" or "game" was the standard term used to describe drama until William Shakespeare's time—just as its creator was a "play-maker" rather than a "dramatist" and the building was a "play-house" rather than a "theatre"; the use of "drama" in a more narrow sense to designate a specific type of play dates from the modern era. "Drama" in this sense refers to a play, neither a comedy nor a tragedy—for example, Zola's Thérèse Raquin or Chekhov's Ivanov. It is this narrower sense that the film and television industries, along with film studies, adopted to describe "drama" as a genre within their respective media.
"Radio drama" has been used in both senses—originally transmitted in a live performance, it has been used to describe the more high-brow and serious end of the dramatic output of radio. The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a collective form of reception; the structure of dramatic texts, unlike other forms of literature, is directly influenced by this collaborative production and collective reception. Mime is a form of drama. Drama can be combined with music: the dramatic text in opera is sung throughout. Musicals include songs. Closet drama describes a form, intended to be read, rather than performed. In improvisation, the drama does not pre-exist the moment of performance. Western drama originates in classical Greece; the theatrical culture of the city-state of Athens produced three genres of drama: tragedy and the satyr play. Their origins remain obscure, though by the 5th century BC they were institutionalised in competitions held as part of festivities celebrating the god Dionysus.
Historians know the names of many ancient Greek dramatists, not least Thespis, credited with the innovation of an actor who speaks and impersonates a character, while interacting with the chorus and its leader, who were a traditional part of the performance of non-dramatic poetry. Only a small fraction of the work of five dramatists, has survived to this day: we have a small number of complete texts by the tragedians Aeschylus and Euripides, the comic writers Aristophanes and, from the late 4th century, Menander. Aeschylus' historical tragedy The Persians is the oldest surviving drama, although when it won first prize at the City Dionysia competition in 472 BC, he had been writing plays for more than 25 years; the competition for tragedies may have begun as early as 534 BC. Tragic dramatists were required to present a tetralogy of plays, which consisted of three tragedies and one satyr play. Comedy was recognized with a prize in the competition from 487 to 486 BC. Five comic dramatists competed at the City Dionysia.
Ancient Greek comedy is traditionally divided between "old comedy", "middle comedy" and "new comedy". Following the expansion of the Roman Republic into several Greek territories between 270–240 BC, Rome encountered Greek drama. From the years of the republic and by means of the Roman Empire, theatre spread west across Europe, around the Mediterranean and reached England. While Greek drama continued to be performed throughout the Roman period, the year 240 BC marks the beginning of regular Roman drama. From the beginning of the empire, interest in full-length drama declined in favour of a broader variety of theatrical entertainments; the first important works of Roman literature were the tragedies and comedies that Livius Andronicus wrote from 240 BC. Five years Gnaeus Naevius began to write drama. No plays from either writer have survived. While both dramatists composed in both genres, Andronicus was most appreciated for his tragedies and Naevius for his comedies. By the beginning of the 2nd century BC, drama was established in Rome and a guild of writers had been formed.
The Roman comedies that have survived are all fabula palliata (comedies b
Agnes Moorehead
Agnes Robertson Moorehead was an American actress whose 41-year career included work in radio, stage and television. She is best known for her role as Endora on the television series Bewitched, but she has notable roles in films, including Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Dark Passage, All That Heaven Allows, Show Boat, Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Moorehead played lead roles, but her skill at character development and range earned her one Primetime Emmy Award and two Golden Globe Awards in addition to nominations for four Academy Awards and six Emmy Awards, she was the first woman to host the Oscars ceremony. Her transition to television won acclaim for comedy, she could play many different types, but portrayed haughty, arrogant characters. Agnes Robertson Moorehead was born on December 6, 1900 in Clinton, the daughter of former singer Mary, 16 when she was born, Presbyterian clergyman John Henderson Moorehead, she was of English, Irish and Welsh ancestry. Moorehead claimed that she was born in 1906 in order to appear younger for acting parts.
She recalled that she made her first public performance at the age of three, when she recited The Lord's Prayer in her father's church. The family moved to St. Louis and her ambition to become an actress grew "very strong", her mother indulged her active imagination asking, "Who are you today, Agnes?" while Moorehead and her younger sister Peggy engaged in mimicry. This involved imitating their father's parishioners, they were further encouraged by his amused reactions. Moorehead spoke of her sister after her sudden death at age 23; as a young lady, Moorehead joined the chorus of the St. Louis Municipal Opera Company, known as "The Muny". In addition to her interest in acting, she developed a lifelong interest in religion. Moorehead always said that she graduated from Central High School in St. Louis in 1918. However, she appears in no Central High School yearbook while she does appear in the yearbook of Soldan High School, she lived near Soldan High School on Union Boulevard. Although her father did not discourage her acting ambitions, he insisted that she obtain a formal education.
Moorehead earned a bachelor's degree in 1923, majoring in biology at Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio. While there, she appeared in college stage plays, she received an honorary doctorate in literature from Muskingum in 1947, served for a year on its board of trustees. When her family moved to Reedsburg, she taught public school for five years in Soldiers Grove, while she earned a master's degree in English and public speaking at the University of Wisconsin, she pursued postgraduate studies at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, from which she graduated with honors in 1929. Moorehead received an honorary doctoral degree from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. Moorehead's early career was unsteady, although she was able to find stage work, she was unemployed, she recalled going four days without food, said that it had taught her "the value of a dollar". She found work in radio and was soon in demand working on several programs in a single day, she believed that it offered her excellent training and allowed her to develop her voice to create a variety of characterizations.
Moorehead met actress Helen Hayes, who encouraged her to enter films, but her first attempts were met with failure. When she was rejected as not being "the right type", Moorehead returned to radio. By 1937, Moorehead had joined Orson Welles' Mercury Players, as one of his principal performers along with Joseph Cotten, she performed in his The Mercury Theatre on the Air radio adaptations, had a regular role opposite Welles in the serial The Shadow as Margo Lane. In 1939, Welles moved the Mercury Theatre to Hollywood. Several of his radio performers joined him, Moorehead made her film debut as the mother of his own character, Charles Foster Kane, in Citizen Kane, considered by most film critics as one of the best films made. Moorehead was featured in Welles' second film, The Magnificent Ambersons, received the New York Film Critics Award and an Academy Award nomination for her performance, she appeared in Journey Into Fear, a Mercury film production. Moorehead received positive reviews for her performance in Mrs. Parkington as well as the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress and an Academy Award nomination.
Moorehead played another strong role in The Big Street with Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball, appeared in two films that failed to find an audience, Government Girl with Olivia de Havilland and The Youngest Profession with adolescent Virginia Weidler. By the mid-1940s, Moorehead became a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player, negotiating a $6,000-a-week contract with the provision to perform on radio, an unusual clause at the time. Moorehead explained that MGM refused to allow their actors to play on radio as "the actors didn't have the knowledge or the taste or the judgment to appear on the right sort of show." In 1943–1944, Moorehead portrayed "matronly housek
Actor
An actor is a person who portrays a character in a performance. The actor performs "in the flesh" in the traditional medium of the theatre or in modern media such as film and television; the analogous Greek term is ὑποκριτής "one who answers". The actor's interpretation of their role—the art of acting—pertains to the role played, whether based on a real person or fictional character. Interpretation occurs when the actor is "playing themselves", as in some forms of experimental performance art. In ancient Greece and Rome, the medieval world, the time of William Shakespeare, only men could become actors, women's roles were played by men or boys. After the English Restoration of 1660, women began to appear on stage in England. In modern times in pantomime and some operas, women play the roles of boys or young men. After 1660 in England, when women first started to appear on stage, the terms actor or actress were used interchangeably for female performers, but influenced by the French actrice, actress became the used term for women in theater and film.
The etymology is a simple derivation from actor with -ess added. When referring to groups of performers of both sexes, actors is preferred. Actor is used before the full name of a performer as a gender-specific term. Within the profession, the re-adoption of the neutral term dates to the post-war period of the 1950 and'60s, when the contributions of women to cultural life in general were being reviewed; when The Observer and The Guardian published their new joint style guide in 2010, it stated "Use for both male and female actors. The guide's authors stated that "actress comes into the same category as authoress, manageress,'lady doctor','male nurse' and similar obsolete terms that date from a time when professions were the preserve of one sex.". "As Whoopi Goldberg put it in an interview with the paper:'An actress can only play a woman. I'm an actor – I can play anything.'" The UK performers' union Equity has no policy on the use of "actor" or "actress". An Equity spokesperson said that the union does not believe that there is a consensus on the matter and stated that the "...subject divides the profession".
In 2009, the Los Angeles Times stated that "Actress" remains the common term used in major acting awards given to female recipients. With regard to the cinema of the United States, the gender-neutral term "player" was common in film in the silent film era and the early days of the Motion Picture Production Code, but in the 2000s in a film context, it is deemed archaic. However, "player" remains in use in the theatre incorporated into the name of a theatre group or company, such as the American Players, the East West Players, etc. Actors in improvisational theatre may be referred to as "players". In 2015, Forbes reported that "...just 21 of the 100 top-grossing films of 2014 featured a female lead or co-lead, while only 28.1% of characters in 100 top-grossing films were female...". "In the U. S. there is an "industry-wide in salaries of all scales. On average, white women get paid 78 cents to every dollar a white man makes, while Hispanic women earn 56 cents to a white male's dollar, Black women 64 cents and Native American women just 59 cents to that."
Forbes' analysis of US acting salaries in 2013 determined that the "...men on Forbes' list of top-paid actors for that year made 21/2 times as much money as the top-paid actresses. That means that Hollywood's best-compensated actresses made just 40 cents for every dollar that the best-compensated men made." The first recorded case of a performing actor occurred in 534 BC when the Greek performer Thespis stepped onto the stage at the Theatre Dionysus to become the first known person to speak words as a character in a play or story. Prior to Thespis' act, Grecian stories were only expressed in song, in third person narrative. In honor of Thespis, actors are called Thespians; the male actors in the theatre of ancient Greece performed in three types of drama: tragedy and the satyr play. Western theatre developed and expanded under the Romans; the theatre of ancient Rome was a thriving and diverse art form, ranging from festival performances of street theatre, nude dancing, acrobatics, to the staging of situation comedies, to high-style, verbally elaborate tragedies.
As the Western Roman Empire fell into decay through the 4th and 5th centuries, the seat of Roman power shifted to Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire. Records show that mime, scenes or recitations from tragedies and comedies and other entertainments were popular. From the 5th century, Western Europe was plunged into a period of general disorder. Small nomadic bands of actors traveled around Europe throughout the period, performing wherever they could find an audience. Traditionally, actors were not of high status. Early Middle Ages actors were denounced by the Church during the Dark Ages, as they were viewed as dangerous and pagan. In many parts of Europe, traditional beliefs of the region and time period meant actors could not receive a Christian burial. In the Early Middle Ages, churches in Europe began staging dramatized versions of biblical events. By the middle of the 11th century, liturgical drama had spread from Russia to Scandinavia
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into U. S. drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, Swedish playwright August Strindberg. The drama Long Day's Journey into Night is numbered on the short list of the finest U. S. plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. O'Neill's plays were among the first to include speeches in American English vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society, they struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, but slide into disillusionment and despair. Of his few comedies, only one is well-known. Nearly all of his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism. O'Neill was born in a hotel, the Barrett House, at Broadway and 43rd Street, on what was Longacre Square. A commemorative plaque was first dedicated there in 1957.
The site is now occupied by 1500 Broadway, which houses offices and the ABC Studios. He was the son of Irish immigrant actor James O'Neill and Mary Ellen Quinlan, of Irish descent; because his father was on tour with a theatrical company, accompanied by Eugene's mother, O'Neill was sent to St. Aloysius Academy for Boys, a Catholic boarding school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where he found his only solace in books, his father suffered from alcoholism. The O'Neill family reunited for summers at the Monte Cristo Cottage in Connecticut, he briefly attended Betts Academy in Stamford. He attended Princeton University for one year. Accounts vary as to, he may have been dropped for attending too few classes, been suspended for "conduct code violations," or "for breaking a window", or according to a more concrete but apocryphal account, because he threw "a beer bottle into the window of Professor Woodrow Wilson", the future president of the United States. O'Neill spent several years at sea, during which he suffered from alcoholism.
Despite this, he had a deep love for the sea and it became a prominent theme in many of his plays, several of which are set on board ships like those on which he worked. O'Neill joined the Marine Transport Workers Union of the Industrial Workers of the World, fighting for improved living conditions for the working class using quick'on the job' direct action. O'Neill's parents and elder brother Jamie died within three years of one another, not long after he had begun to make his mark in the theater. After his experience in 1912–13 at a sanatorium where he was recovering from tuberculosis, he decided to devote himself full-time to writing plays. O'Neill had been employed by the New London Telegraph, writing poetry as well as reporting. In the fall of 1914, he entered Harvard University to attend a course in dramatic technique given by Professor George Baker, he did not complete the course. During the 1910s O'Neill was a regular on the Greenwich Village literary scene, where he befriended many radicals, most notably Communist Labor Party of America founder John Reed.
O'Neill had a brief romantic relationship with Reed's wife, writer Louise Bryant. O'Neill was portrayed about the life of John Reed, his involvement with the Provincetown Players began in mid-1916. O'Neill is said to have arrived for the summer in Provincetown with "a trunk full of plays." Susan Glaspell describes a reading of Bound East for Cardiff that took place in the living room of Glaspell and her husband George Cram Cook's home on Commercial Street, adjacent to the wharf, used by the Players for their theater: "So Gene took Bound East for Cardiff out of his trunk, Freddie Burt read it to us, Gene staying out in the dining-room while reading went on. He was not left alone in the dining-room when the reading had finished." The Provincetown Players performed many of O'Neill's early works in their theaters both in Provincetown and on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. Some of these early plays began downtown and moved to Broadway. One of these early one acts written by O'Neill was The Web.
Written in 1913, this is the first time O'Neill explores the famous themes he thrives in in his career. The Web was one of O'Neill's first dramas; this one act began his interesting inclusion of the brothel world. This can be showcased. We see O'Neill explore memorable avenues within this play such a including a baby, born out of prostitution; this was a huge stepping stone as O'Neill is exploring fields in which have never before been explored with such success. O'Neill's first published play, Beyond the Horizon, opened on Broadway in 1920 to great acclaim, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, his first major hit was The Emperor Jones, which ran on Broadway in 1920 and obliquely commented on the U. S. occupation of Haiti, a topic of debate in that year's presidential election. His best-known plays include Anna Christie, Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, Mourning Becomes Electra, his only well-known comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, a wistful re-imagining of his youth as he wished it had been.
In 1936 he received the
Ingrid Bergman
Ingrid Bergman was a Swedish actress who starred in a variety of European and American films. She won many accolades, including three Academy Awards, two Emmy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Tony Award, she is best remembered for her roles as Alicia Huberman in Notorious. Bergman was born in Stockholm to a Swedish father and a German mother and started her career as an actress in Swedish and German films in the 1930s, her introduction to American audiences came with her starring role in the English-language remake of Intermezzo. At her insistence, producer David O. Selznick agreed not to sign her to a contract—for four films, rather than the then-standard seven-year period at her insistence—until after Intermezzo had been released. Selznick's financial problems meant that Bergman was loaned to other studios. Apart from Casablanca, her performances from this period include Victor Fleming's remake of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Bells of St. Mary's.
Her last films for Selznick were Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound and Notorious. Her final film for Hitchcock was Under Capricorn. After a decade in American films, she starred in Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli, following the revelation that she was having an extramarital affair with the director; the affair and marriage to Rossellini created a scandal in the U. S. that forced her to remain in Europe for several years, after which she made a successful return to working for a Hollywood studio in Anastasia, for which she won her second Academy Award. Although she made many films for Hollywood studios in subsequent years, they were all made in Europe, she did not film in Hollywood again until 1969. According to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, Bergman became "the ideal of American womanhood" and a contender for Hollywood's greatest leading actress. In the United States, she is considered to have brought a "Nordic freshness and vitality" to the screen, along with exceptional beauty and intelligence.
In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Bergman as the fourth-greatest female screen legend of Classic Hollywood Cinema. Bergman was born on 29 August 1915 in Stockholm, to a Swedish father, Justus Samuel Bergman, his German wife, Friedel Henrietta Augusta Louise Bergman, born in Kiel, her parents married in Hamburg in 1907. She was named after Princess Ingrid of Sweden, she grew up in Sweden, but spent the summers in Germany, spoke fluent German. When she was two years old, her mother died, her father, an artist and photographer, died when she was 13. In the years before he died, he wanted her to become an opera star, had her take voice lessons for three years, but she always "knew from the beginning that she wanted to be an actress", sometimes wearing her mother's clothes and staging plays in her father's empty studio. Her father documented all her birthdays with a borrowed camera. After his death, she was sent to live with an aunt, she moved in with her Aunt Hulda and Uncle Otto, who had five children.
Another aunt she visited, Elsa Adler, whom Ingrid called "Mutti" told a family legend to the 11-year-old, according to Charlotte Chandler's biography of Ingrid Bergman, that her mother may have had "some Jewish blood". One of Bergman's biographers, Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm, believes the claim was an embellishment. After doing an in-depth genealogical investigation, Bergman's maternal cousin found no Jewish ancestry on Bergman's mother's side. Furthermore, an investigation of Bergman's ancestry in 1938 when she signed a contract with the German company Universum Film found only non-Jewish ancestors, she received a scholarship to the state-sponsored Royal Dramatic Theatre School, where Greta Garbo had some years earlier earned a similar scholarship. After several months, she was given a part in a new play, Ett Brott, written by Sigfrid Siwertz. Chandler notes that this was "totally against procedure" at the school, where girls were expected to complete three years of study before getting such acting roles.
During her first summer break, she was hired by a Swedish film studio, which led to her leaving the Royal Dramatic Theatre after just one year, to work in films full-time. Her first film role after leaving the Royal Dramatic Theatre was a small part in Munkbrogreven, although she had been an extra in the 1932 film Landskamp), she went on to act in a dozen films in Sweden, including En kvinnas ansikte, remade as A Woman's Face with Joan Crawford, one film in Germany, Die vier Gesellen. Bergman's first acting role in the United States came when Hollywood producer David O. Selznick brought her to America to star in Intermezzo: A Love Story, an English language remake of her earlier Swedish film Intermezzo. Unable to speak English, uncertain about her acceptance by the American audience, she expected to complete this one film and return home to Sweden, her husband, Dr. Petter Lindström, remained in Sweden with their daughter Pia. In Intermezzo, she played the role of a young piano accompanist opposite Leslie Howard as a famous violin virtuoso.
She arrived in Los Angeles on 6 May 1939, stayed at the Selznick home until she could find another residence. According to Selznick's son Danny, a child at the time, his father had concerns about Ingrid: "She didn't speak Engli
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