From the S&S archives:
Ingrid Bergman grants she's too old for screen romance

INGRID BERGMAN, who has given the screen some of its most memorable love scenes, is gradually withdrawing from romantic roles. Not by choice and certainly not by necessity, for at 47 she is still one of the most attractive stars in the film world.

But she feels that as a woman she does not have the same license to flout time as does Cary Grant, who is 60 and still flirting with co-stars as young as Audrey Hepburn.

Miss Bergman laughed and said:

"Cary is quite remarkable, you know. I think Audrey is now too old for him, and in his next picture he will be making love to someone like Jane Fonda."

From the distance of a few feet in the bright light of a film set, Miss Bergman looked approximately as she did when we first met in Paris six years ago, and I told her so.

"You are kind," she smiled. "The French say 'On se defend bien' — One defends one's self well-but we all know that time must be the victor. And, since my age is not a secret, I do not think it would be right to play love scenes with men 10 or more years younger. As I said, I am not Cary Grant. The public does not accept this age difference when the older of the two is the woman. Not for long, anyway."

Miss Bergman sat on the set of her new film, Anatole de Grunwald's "The Yellow Rolls Royce," in a blue silk costume of the 1940 period, wearing a flowered hat just a shade too flowery for high fashion.

"I am playing a New England matron," she said, sounding for the moment like the purest Back Bay Boston. "I've got to remember to talk American."

Her off-screen speaking voice is still faintly accented with her native Swedish. Her sentence construction is still sometimes Scandinavian rather than English.

She asked if she could make a request.

"Please put in your questions when you write this," she said. "Sometimes I read about myself, and it looks as though I were bringing up matters I really would never talk about, except that I am asked.

"Like what? The Rossellini matter?"

"Well, that, of course. Do you realize it was 15 years ago! Robertino is 14, and the twins, Isabella and Ingrid, are 12. And yet people always want to know about it. What do they want me to say? What do they hope I will say that has not been said already?"

At this point she said "ouch" and held up her sleeve. A pin had pricked her.

"You find them all over these costumes," she said. "The dressmakers forget to take them out."

The Rossellini affair — There was a scandal that shook the movie world, all but wrecked her career, subjected her to censure and abuse and the threat of boycott from millions of righteous American clubwomen, even came up on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

In 1949 she fell in love with Italian film director Roberto Rossellini and bore him a child before she could get a divorce from Hollywood surgeon Peter Lindstrom.

The American public did not know her marriage to Lindstrom was doomed anyway, and there were many anxious to brand her a scarlet woman. She eventually married Rossellini, but it was a relationship too violent to last. After the twins were born in 1952, the parents began to drift apart, an estrangement deepened by the failure of their films together.

It was a wounding time. Rossellini was often seen with an Indian girl. Miss Bergman nursed her sorrow, took care of her children and resumed her career with other directors in 1957 in "Anastasia," which won her a second Oscar. She was persuaded to come back to the United States to collect the award, and what she had feared would be an ordeal of ostracism became a tour of triumph.

Once again talent had conquered.

"Roberto and I are still friends," she said. "People used to worry about our children. But children do not demand that parents stay together even if they are miserable. They do not mind if they must part — if they part as friends and not as enemies, always fighting. Our children are happy.

"You remember Robertino in Paris? He's taller than you are now."

I asked about her third husband, Lars Schmidt, the Swedish producer.

"We've been in love — married — six years," she said, "and it has been a very good time for me. We are hoping to take all of 1965 off from our careers so we can be together and visit all the wonderful places our friends keep telling us about."

I recalled that Schmidt insisted she put on her glasses last time we met because he said she was squinting.

"He does look after me, doesn't he," smiled Miss Bergman, very much the satisfied wife.

I asked her plans after "The Yellow Rolls Royce."

"Ah," she said, with quick animation, "that is something 1 want to tell you about. I am going on a sentimental journey this autumn, back to Sweden to play an episode in a film in the same studio in which I made my screen debut at 18 years old. And for the same director, Gustaf Moelander."

"But, during the Rossellini business, you said you would never work in Sweden again."

She lit a cigarette.

"Yes, I know I said that. It was because I was hurt by the terrible things journalists — only some of them — wrote about me at the time. How they could have written what they did I will never understand. But time passes, doesn't it, and it will be nice to be in the Svensk Filmindustri studios again with Moelander.

"I remember it all so well. He used to say to me: 'Turn here. Now walk there. Now do this or do that.' That first picture was `Intermezzo.' It was shown in America as 'Escape to Happiness', and I came to the attention of Mr. Selznick. So it all started."

She laughed in delight, a tiny tracery of lines around her eyes showing under the makeup for the first time.

"Wouldn't it be too wonderful if some of the electricians who were there when I was young are still working at the studio?"

I said I had heard her daughter, Jenny Lindstrom, 25, was now making films her career.

Miss Bergman, the film star, became Miss Bergman, the proud mother and press agent.

"She has another small part in a new film," she said. "You know, she doesn't have a single bad camera angle. She is always beautiful."

A studio messenger trotted up:

"Ten minutes, Miss Bergman."

The actress arose and performed a small sample of the magic that must break the heart of the breast-heaving, furniture-kickers of the method acting school. She seemed simply to square her shoulders and suddenly she was — to the life — Mrs. Daisy Millett of New England.