Seducing Ingrid Bergman
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
Chris Greenhalgh, screenwriter of the 2009 film Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, captures the love affair between two unforgettable people: Casablanca actress Ingrid Bergman and legendary photographer Robert Capa, in this heart-wrenching novel Seducing Ingrid Bergman.
June, 1945.
In newly liberated Paris, battle-ravaged photographer Robert Capa is drowning his sorrows. After ten years of recording horror and violence, he longs for for a diversion.
Ingrid Bergman has been sent to entertain the troops and when she walks into the Ritz Hotel, Capa is enchanted. From the moment he slips a mischievous invitation to dinner under her door, the two find themselves helplessly attracted. Ingrid, tired of her passionless marriage, and her controlling film studio, is desperate for freedom and excitement.
And Capa is willing to oblige. Dinners in cafés he can't afford. Night walks along the Seine. Dancing barefoot in nightclubs. Trysts in hotel rooms. He brings her back to life and she fills the hole inside him.
With everything at stake, both Capa and Ingrid are presented with terrible choices.
Full of the romantic glamour of 40s Paris and Hollywood, Seducing Ingrid Bergman tells the heart-wrenching story of the secret affair between the iconic Casablanca star and the famous photographer.
'Delightful and engrossing . . . a marvellous piece of writing . . . I read it with huge enjoyment' Barbara Erskine, author of Whispers in the Sand
'Greenhalgh's characters are sharply drawn, in particular the contrast between Bergman's inner turmoil and the slick celebrity seen by the public. Capas's self-image is equally conflicted, but together the two conjure a delicious tale of illicit freedom and, ultimately, thwarted love' Financial Times
'From a jubilant, irresistibly romantic Paris just after World War II, to Hollywood during its golden age, Chris Greenhaugh's Seducing Ingrid Bergman rapturously depicts the doomed love affair of two icons of the twentieth century. Like its protagonists Ingrid Bergman and Robert Capa, this is a book with both a sentimental heart and a soul of grit. I loved it.' Melanie Benjamin, New York Times Bestselling author of The Aviator's Wife.
Chris Greenhalgh is the prize-winning author of three volumes of poetry, a novel, and wrote the screenplay for Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, which occupied the prestigious closing slot at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. He lives with his wife and two sons in Sevenoaks.
www.chris-greenhalgh.com
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Slipstreaming behind The Paris Wife and any number of other fact-based love stories that use the City of Light as a backdrop, this middling novel from Greenhalgh (Coco Igor) centers on the real-life love affair between combat photographer Robert Capa and Hollywood movie star Ingrid Bergman at the end of WWII. He's with his good friend, writer Irwin Shaw, and she's about to start a USO tour of Europe. After meeting at the Ritz Hotel, the two fall helplessly in love. The romance is not without tension, since Bergman is married and Capa is not used to commitment. The affair continues after Bergman returns to Hollywood to film Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, but can it survive Capa's growing dissipation and Bergman's mounting guilt? The author dutifully fills in Capa's past to explain his Gypsy-like existence and Ingrid's unhappy domestic life with a controlling husband to show her need for real love. In the end, Greenhalgh doesn't find anything convincingly truthful in this true story.