I just watched the documentary "Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words" (2015). What struck me was how happy she was. I expected to learn about her tragedies and heartbreaks, because she simultaneously radiates joy and a certain beautiful melancholy that I find completely enchanting--and I was certain was born of some sort of terrible Nordic tragedies. But and while she had significant losses in her life early on--the film began with her 1929 diary entry about all the people (including her father) who had died that year--it seemed she left sadness behind in Sweden once she came to the States. Letter after letter to her friend Mollie expressed how happy she was...and who wouldn't be, arriving at the home of David Selznick who held a party for her that included Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, and so many others it sounded like a Hollywood fairy tale. And that was just the beginning...everything else seemed to fall gracefully into her lap-- and she lapped it up. "What a feeling when your dreams come true" she wrote to Mollie.
About 10 years after arriving in Hollywood, she played Joan of Arc, directed by Victor Fleming in 1948. Film clips of her on the set laughing and goofing around in her Joan armor and even in her Joan death cloak are, again, I have no other word--enchanting.
And it turns out, she always had a thing for Joan. "I collected medallions, and statues of her" she said, and she played "Joan of Lorraine" two years prior in New York in Maxwell Anderson's "Joan of Lorraine", for which she won a Tony Award.
What I found most compelling was her daughter Pia's commentary on Ingrid's love of Joan. "I always wondered why she was so fascinated with Joan of Arc...and I think it's because it's a young girl, a poor peasant girl, who goes out into the world and does something heroic. I don't think it was a religious thing for her...but a heroic thing."
It makes perfect sense with so much talk by Ingrid herself in interviews about how she knew she would leave Sweden and see the world.
She took her first job on a film at age 15, as an extra. Joan was 16 when she left home to fulfill her destiny.
Ingrid didn't leave home until almost 10 years later, when she came to America...
And she was happy.
******
A woman who penned a book of poems about Joan of Arc told me that she thinks "people who have suffered pain are drawn to Joan of Arc." I had told her about my brother dying when I was a teen, and also about how I was just starting to explore the connection I may have built to Joan because of this tragedy.
(After all, I was 16 when he died...)
I have built a narrative around Joan that is tied to the death of my brother, who died a year younger than she did.
I just wrote and presented a speech last month about how the 16th anniversary of the Joan of Arc Parade was the "sweet sixteenth birthday I never had".
But tonight, watching happy Ingrid, and thinking of her loving Joan for a different reason, has made me rethink my own Joan origins.
Perhaps it was that I was a girl from Lorain County, Ohio, and I admired the Maid from Lorraine for leaving home and fulfilling her destiny, which I also, like Ingrid, dreamed of doing.
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