Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Ingrid Bergman Transforming
Saturday, August 8, 2015 at 4:20PM 
All month long we're celebrating Ingrid Bergman's centennial. Here's Jason on Bergman taking charge of her own career...
By 1941 Ingrid Bergman had followed up her first Hollywood foray Intermezzo (which abstew so beautifully introduced this series with on Thursday) with two more movies where she played, and these are her words, "a Hollywood peaches-and-cream girl," meaning the nice nicer nicest girl you ever did see, and she was fed up with it. In Adam Had Four Sons she was "the nice housekeeper" and in Rage in Heaven she was "a nice refugee." She wanted to actually be an actress, and act, and challenge herself. Producer David O. Selznick thought he had the winning formula though, and wanted to keep the ship steady. In her autobiography Bergman said of Selznick:
"David believed the Hollywood legend: the elevator boy always plays the elevator boy, the drunk's a drunk, the nurse always a nurse. In Hollywood you got yourself one role and you played it forever. That's what the audience wants to see, they said, the same old performance, the familiar face."
Selznick loved her already familiar face though and he was lining up projects left and right for her -- next on her plate was a remake of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde...
