 Starring: Ingrid Bergman, Liv Ullman, Lena Mynam
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Year Of Release: 1978
Plot: Repressed Eva invites her mother, world famous concert pianist Charlotte, to come and stay with her and her husband. On arriving, Charlotte is surprised to find that her other daughter, the seriously ill Helena, is there, as she believed she was in a home. The tension between mother and children builds, until Eva lets rip with years of pent up frustration with her difficult parent. |
Made in 1978, Autumn Sonata was Ingrid Bergman’s final theatrical film and what a performance it was to finish with (however, she did later play Golda Meir in a 1982 TV movie, shortly before she died of cancer). It may be a pretty bleak, depressing movie but Bergman gives a truly remarkable performance as a concert pianist who doesn’t understand how the demands she put on her children have affected them. It is a raw, mesmerising and incredibly human piece of acting, which is a hundred miles away from the heroine of Casablanca and Bergman's roles as Hitchcock’s 1940s muse.
If your screen career is ending, this is the way to do it, showing the world that you’re not just a movie star but a superlative actor. Even though Bergman had already won three Oscars – for Gaslight, Anastasia and Murder On The Orient Express – Autumn Sonata is something else entirely (she received an Oscar nomination for the film, but lost out to Jane Fonda for Coming Home). Bergman herself acknowledged this, saying about the reaction to Autumn Sonata, “After three Oscars, they finally decided I can act.”
The first time I saw the movie I was literally stunned and could barely believe that this was same woman who’d lit up Hollywood’s Golden Age.
It’s a shame all great actors and actresses can’t have a final role like Bergman did. Much of the time by the end of their life, actors’ career have slid into oblivion and they’re reliant on whatever part comes along. For example Orson Welles, director and star of what many people consider to be the greatest film ever made, Citizen Kane, ended his career with a couple of guest spots on Magnum P.I. and playing the voice of Unicron in Transformers: The Movie.
Both Joan Crawford and Bette Davis found it difficult to give up their leading lady status, and so ended up in some awful movies, where the most important thing to them seemed to be their billing. Crawford’s final theatrically released movie was the god-awful b-movie Trog, where she plays a scientist trying to communicate with a half-human, half-ape missing link. Davis did little better with Wicked Stepmother, which she knew was going to be so awful that she actually walked off the set partway through filming, never to return. The script was rewritten to explain her absence for much of the movie, but the few scenes that she did complete became her final movie role.
There’s also The Misfits, which would be utterly forgotten now if it didn’t feature the final screen performances of both Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe. Audrey Hepburn’s last role, in the Steven Spielberg misfire Always, is also probably best forgotten, while playing an animated dog in An American Tail: Fievel Goes West isn’t exactly how you’d hope a legend like Jimmy Stewart would have last been seen in cinemas.
However perhaps the most unfortunate is Peter Sellers, whose final movie ended up being the incredibly ropey The Trail Of The Pink Panther, a film that didn’t start production until after he’d died, but which was cobbled together using outtakes and flashbacks from previous Pink Panther movies, as well as using body doubles. Sellers third wife eventually won a $1.475 million lawsuit against the makers of the film, claiming it insulted his memory.
Elizabeth Taylor had also better get a move on and make another theatrical film, even if she only turns up in something and waves at the camera, as otherwise her final movie role will be an OTT cameo in the live-action Flintstones film.
Thankfully Ingrid Bergman isn’t the only one to go out on a high with their last cinematic role. Henry Fonda won an Oscar for On Golden Pond just a few months before he passed away, while Spencer Tracy died only 17 days after finishing production on the classic Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner. Peter Finch became the first person to win a posthumous acting Oscar for his final theatrical role as mad-as-hell TV presenter Howard Beale in Network, where he gives what must be one of the best screen performances ever.
There’s also Burt Lancaster, who enjoyed a small but memorable coda to his career in Field Of Dreams, wile both Giant and Rebel Without A Cause were released after James Dean had died. (Fonda, Finch and Lancaster appeared in later TV movies, but these were their final cinematic roles).
Also worth mentioning is The Godfather’s Fredo, John Cazale, whose final role was as Stan in The Deer Hunter (he also appeared later in The Godfather: Part III, but only in archive footage). It capped a short but virtually unprecedented screen career where he only appeared in movies that were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar (The Conversation, The Godfather, The Godfather: Part II, Dog Day Afternoon and The Deer Hunter), three of which won. Sadly Cazale died of bone cancer in 1978.
One other odd but noteworthy final performance is Jane Darwell, who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing Ma Joad in 1939’s The Grapes Of Wrath. However, despite being a well known character actress in the 30s and 40s, making over 200 TV and screen appearances in things ranging from Gone With The Wind to 3 Godfathers (which is particularly impressive considering she didn’t make her first movie until she was 40), people are unlikely to know who she is until you mention that her final screen appearance was as the Bird Woman in Mary Poppins. It may not have shown her range as an actress, but it’s certainly a memorable role. She came out of retirement to film the part at the request of Walt Disney, who went to visit her in her old folks home to convince her to take part in the film.
However it is perhaps Ingrid Bergman’s performance that is the most startling, simply because it almost feels like the actress is suddenly revealing there’s so much more to her than we’d ever seen before, but which because of her death, we’ll never see again. In truth her performance only came after massive battles with director Ingmar Bergman, who said that when she first arrived on set her acting was awful, but after fights over how the role should be played, they came up with something truly extraordinary. It probably didn’t hurt either that she was acting in her native Swedish.
Of course most actors don’t make a film thinking it will be their last and so it’s inevitable that some people will go out on a high with a good part in a great film, while others will end up finishing their career in something that doesn’t quite seem fitting as a cinematic swansong. However it’s difficult to imagine anyone hitting a final home run quite as well as Ingrid Bergman did in Autumn Sonata.
TIM ISAAC
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