Ingrid Bergman was 21 in 1936 when the original Swedish version of Intermezzo was released. It was the film (her sixth) which brought her to the attention of producer David O. Selznick and, three years later, to Hollywood, where Selznick made a second Intermezzo with Bergman and Leslie Howard. In the Swedish film, Bergman plays opposite then matinee idol Gosta Ekman; she is a young pianist, he is a renowned violinist. Their love affair is, for him, the “intermezzo” of the film's title: when the affair ends in near-tragedy, he returns to a patient wife and family.
Not that Bergman in this film was glad for the end of the “intermezzo,” but it was perhaps her distress at the prospect of breaking up a marriage that prompted comments such as Jean Renoir's, “In the frivolous Swedish cinema of the Thirties, she is pre-eminent, not merely as an actress but also as a symbol of sweetness, light and moral sanity,” and Peter Cowie's, “In so many of her films, she is at one moment the shy, sensual creature of circumstance, and at the next a vessel of wisdom and resource to whom others turn for emotional reassurance.” The composition of Bergman's star quality had been much debated, but it was the original Intermezzo which allowed for a consensus.