How Ingrid Bergman became Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls

I just watched For Whom the Bell Tolls one more time. I have watched at least 5 times, will watch another 5 times, no doubt.

Hemingway helped Ingrid Bergman get the role as Maria; he mentioned Ingrid as a possible Maria in an article in Life. When Hemingway and Ingrid first met, he gave her a copy of his For Whom the Bell Tolls with an inscription of “To Ingrid Bergman, who is the Maria of this story” and told her that “If you don’t act in the picture, Ingrid, I won’t work on it.” Keep in mind Paramount Pictures then thought this Swedish beauty “dumb”, “wooden”, and “untalented”. Hemingway apparently put pressure on David Selznick (who also produced Gone with the Wind) to select Ingrid.

After shooting the movie Gary Cooper and Hemingway became good buddy and often went big game together.

After discovering the DNA structure at Cambridge, England, James Watson went to Cal Tech; the day he arrived Gary Cooper and his daughter (a high school senior then) was visiting the school. Cooper was the different breed of movie star comparing with what we have nowadays.

Hemingway was injured working as an ambulance driver during WWI and fell in love with a Red Cross nurse (many years his senior) coming from Bellevue Hospital, NYC (I once spent 3 months in the pulmonary service at VA Hospital Manhattan, where there was a “walk-way” bridge connection high on the air between the two hospitals.) And this was the story behind “A Farewell to Arms”; I read the book and fell in love with Catherine Barkley (a British nurse in the book—I am hoping Katy is not reading this). Hemingway was a man of action; he wrote using subjective and verb only and used adjective only when it was absolutely necessary, but one can see ‘grand’ almost every other page in this book. In fact, that was how I got “Grand Garden”