Pure sophistication

Ingrid Bergman was more than the luminous image of healthy sensuality that intoxicated audiences worldwide during and immediately after World War II in movies like Casablanca, Gaslight, Spellbound and Notorious. In later life she found continued film success with Anastasia, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, Indiscreet, and Autumn Sonata. She was also a ferociously ambitious actress who played Strindberg, O’Neill, Cocteau, and Maugham on the stage to great acclaim, as well as a woman who found the most lasting sensual experience to be found in the response of an audience rather than any individual husband or lover.

The Movie Icon series: People talk about Hollywood glamour, about studios that had more stars than there are in heaven, about actors who weren’t actors but were icons. Other people talk about these things, TASCHEN shows you. Movie Icons is a series of photo books that feature the most famous personalities in the history of cinema. These 192-page books are visual biographies of the stars. For each title, series editor Paul Duncan has painstaking selected approximately 150 high quality enigmatic and sumptuous portraits, colorful posters and lobby cards, rare film stills, and previously unpublished candid photos showing the stars as they really are. These images are accompanied by concise introductory essays by leading film writers; each book also includes a chronology, a filmography, and a bibliography, and is peppered with apposite quotes from the movies and from life. All the icons in the first 20 books of the series were voted for by over 7500 TASCHEN readers in a special online poll!

Scott Eyman, Books Editor of the Palm Beach Post, is the author of Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise, The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution 1926-1930 and Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford, among others. He lives in Palm Beach, Florida.