One Thing at a Time

At rehearsals for next week's U.S. premiere of Eugene O'Neill's More Stately Mansions, the leading lady strode to the top row of Los Angeles' new Ahmanson Theater. "This great theater," she proclaimed, "will be filled with O'Neill's beautiful words." In fact, a throbbing contralto was already filling the house. The rehearsing star was Ingrid Bergman, making her first U.S. stage appearance in 21 years.

It is almost that long ago that Berg man quit Hollywood and her husband to live with Italian Director Roberto Rossellini, whom she later married and then bitterly left in 1957. At 52 (last week), she has never seemed so relaxed and refreshed -- a tall, golden woman in handsome summer shifts and sandals.

According to her dialogue coach, Ruth Roberts, who has known Bergman since her Hollywood arrival in 1939: "She is so much freer than when she first came -- she has the inner security of a woman who's living life fully."

Loving & Loafing. For Bergman, the full life revolves around three places --Paris, Rome and Danholmen, her private island off the Swedish coast. "Paris is my home," she says, meaning a verdant country estate 25 miles from the city, where Third Husband Lars Schmidt, 50, bases his operations as the Continent's leading theatrical producer. Inevitably, there are first nights and informal suppers for five or six.

The cuisine is Swedish, the chef is Bergman, and the vegetables are raised by Schmidt. Most of all, she says, they enjoy "being alone with each other."

On occasion she goes off to Rome for days or weeks to visit her three children by Rossellini--Robertino, 17, and the twins, Ingrid and Isabella, 15. As the result of an acrimonious custody fight the children spend the school year with a governess, vacations with their mother. But the ex-Rossellinis are no longer bitter. He, too, is remarried, to Sonali Das Gupta, his Bombay love.

In Rome, Bergman's role is to be "wholly and completely the mother. I buy their clothes; I go to the schoolteachers and talk about lessons and what they are weak in; I go to the dentist's with them--just like any mother."

At Danholmen, Bergman becomes "completely myself," tending fishnets, hauling wood, pumping water from the well. "The year is very easily passed without work," she admits. Two years ago, she did a London revival of Turgenev's A Month in the Country, and last season an ABC television special, Jean Cocteau's The Human Voice. She has not tried a movie since her unpersuasive appearance in The Yellow Rolls-Royce in 1965.

Working & Worrying. In part, Bergman avoids steady acting because of the fearful intensity with which she approaches it. "When I work, I concentrate completely, and I have not husband nor children. I cannot divide myself. I have to do one thing at the time." Not that she could ever retire:

"I was born to be an actress, and if they take it away from me, I will just lie down and die."

At the moment, she is disenchanted with films because so many emphasize "torture and brutality." She dislikes U.S. TV because of the commercials:

"They cut up everything in America; if it isn't toothpaste, it is soap." As for the theater, it has become "terribly lightweight." Worse, a U.S. actress is all too often typecast: "Here it is the personality that they like, more than the performance. People popped all of us into little boxes. If they wanted someone to be a bad woman, they opened the little box marked Bette Davis. If they wanted a saintly woman, they opened the little box marked Ingrid Bergman."

Not after next week. In More Stately Mansions, Bergman will play an odious matriarch battling her daughter-in-law for her son. Equally important is the chance to perform a "good play" by "America's greatest playwright, one whose work the people ought to be seeing." Despite her personal tranquillity, Bergman is worried about "a world where there can be no peace, where people are continuously hurting each other.

The pride, the power, the greed: it is all in the play, and that's what I like about O'Neill--he gets up there and says it."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.