Portrayals of Mental Illness in Film: George Cukor and Ingrid Bergman in "Gaslight" (1944)

George Cukor was insistent he could have no other actress than Ingrid Bergman as the slowly driven mad Paula Anton. David Selznick was not convinced and neither was the actress herself frightened of taking on a role out of her league in being a frail weak woman. "She wasn't normally a timid woman; she was healthy," Cukor told Gavin Lambert in his later years, "To reduce someone like that to a scared, jittering creature is interesting and dramatic. You have to avoid letting people play scenes before you get to them. It would have been dangerous to cast the kind of actress you'd expect to go mad, the kind you know from the first moment you're in for a big mad scene."

Bergman's portrayal of Paula would be a slow process of being emotionally manipulated. Under the direction of her director, she had spent some time at a mental institution to understand nervous breakdowns. Bergman focused on one woman in particular whose quirks and physical habits would become apart of the character. Cukor would also explain the entire plot of the film to his actress up to the scenes they were set to film considering the lack of a sequential shooting schedule and the hectic emotions Bergman had to take on. "I'm not a dumb Swede, you've told me that before" and with that, Cukor stopped the process for a few days. A producer eventually came up to him pointing out a decline in the acting quality and that everyone appeared to be "acting as though they're under water." Right away, the story-telling process was resumed and Bergman never complained again. She would end up winning the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture in 1945.