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Ingrid Bergman made our list of 10 best Oscar-snubbed performances | 174534__04casablanca_l
TOUCH OF GRAY Bergman (with Bogart) brought mysteriousness and subtlety to ''Casablanca''
Casablanca: Photofest

When Bergman walks into Rick's Café, her Ilsa is ''the most beautiful woman ever to visit Casablanca.'' She pulls us in with a simmering-below-the-surface eroticism and an un-Hollywood freshness that makes her seem earthbound and attainable. And like all great screen actors, she made the camera an accomplice. Watch her face, held in a tight, caressing close-up, as Dooley Wilson's Sam first sings ''As Time Goes By.'' A lesser actress might have overemoted, but Bergman restricts expression to a minimum and just lets the camera play across that gorgeous profile. It's one of those wonderfully mysterious moments when an actor, seemingly by doing nothing, lets us imagine everything. And remember this: As a costar she brought out a pained romanticism in Humphrey Bogart that he'd never shown before nor would again. Likewise, Bergman would never again be quite this luminous.


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Posted Nov 20, 2002 | Order Article Reprints