With her angelic looks, Ingrid Bergman, who died on 29 August 1982 on her 67th birthday, was every inch the perfect Hollywood leading lady.

She made more than 50 films in a career spanning five decades and was involved in some of the most memorable movies made in the 1940s and 1950s.

Top directors clamoured to work with her and she starred alongside many top male leads of her generation.

But Ms Bergman’s career was not all perfect. Liberal-minded American fans vilified her for an affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini while they were both still married to other partners. It was some years before she won them over again.

Ingrid Bergman was born in Stockholm on 29 August 1915 and raised by an uncle and his family after her parents died while she was young.

At 18 she joined the Royal Dramatic Theatre School in Stockholm where she made her professional debut. Her first speaking role was in Gustaf Molander’s film Munkbrogreven (1935) and a year later, under the same director she made Intermezzo , the film that would turn her into a star.

Ms Bergman’s performance caught the eye of Hollywood producer David O. Selznick who bought the rights to the film and flew the actress to the USA to be its star. She never looked back.

In 1938 she married the first of three husbands and had a daughter Pia the following year. Her apparently perfect family life coupled with the wholesome roles she was cast in helped create a saintly image, which would haunt her in later years.

She made some of her best movies through the 1940s including the romantic classic Casablanca (1941) with Humphrey Bogart and For Whom The Bell Tolls (1942) opposite Gary Cooper . The first of three Academy Awards came in the 1944 for Gaslight. She also teamed up with Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant to make Spellbound (1945) and Notorious (1946).

Her affair with Mr Rossellini began while filming Stromboli (1950). News that she was pregnant with their first child Roberto enraged her fans and she moved to Italy to escape the furore. The couple did marry and also had twins Isotta and Isabella, who became a famous actress in her own right.

Ms Bergman made a glorious return to Hollywood in 1956 with her second Oscar-winning performance in Anastasia . More success came with Indiscreet (1958) and The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958). She won her third and final Oscar in the 1974 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.

Her last performance was as former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in the 1982 television mini-series A Woman Called Golda . Later that year, on her birthday she lost a seven year battle with breast cancer.

Ms Bergman once famously said of herself: “I’ve gone from saint to whore and back to saint again, all in one lifetime.”

Nevertheless she refused to bow to her critics: “I have no regrets. I wouldn’t have lived my life in the way I did if I was going to worry about what people were going to say.”

The words of Cary Grant sum up her importance in Hollywood history: “There are only seven movie stars in the world whose name alone will induce American bankers to lend money for movie productions, and the only woman on the list is Ingrid Bergman.”