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She Stayed Beautiful Her Whole Life: The Ingrid Bergman Secret

The best home movies ever? Now streaming on Max: Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words

Joseph Serwach
The Narrative
4 min readJan 8, 2025

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Ingrid Bergman mastered the secret of always looking perfect on camera. Image by Matteo Venturella from Pixabay

You probably know Ingrid Bergman as the powerful center of the love triangle in Casablanca, one of the greatest films ever.

But there’s more.

Today, cameras are constantly recording us — but Ingrid Bergman practically invented the art of modeling for cameras, perfecting the one thing essential to making every picture perfect.

“A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous,” Bergman said. “Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.”

She teaches the real secret of remaining beautiful — and powerful — in Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words, an HBO Max TV documentary relying on her father’s home movies and the directors who adored her.

The documentary’s great power is it shows her vast library of home movies stretching throughout her lifetime. This era connected the dawn of the first film-making to the dawn of the first video cassettes.

“It takes courage to take all the makeup off and really show who you are,” Bergman said.

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Joseph Serwach
Joseph Serwach

Written by Joseph Serwach

Story + Identity = Mission. Leadership Culture, Journalism, Branding Education. Inspiration: Catholic, Polish. https://medium.com/@serwachjoe

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