While their working partnership ended too early for Hitchcock's satisfaction, they remained friends. Bergman and her husband were often invited to forties dinner parties at the Hitchcock home. According to those present, she never seemed to notice that her host was sulking because of his crush on her.
Still, the friendship endured and when the American Film Institute honored him in 1979, she was happy to host the event. She pleased her former director by discarding the script for the evening and improvising. In one of the most touching moments of the program, she announced that she had kept a very important prop key from the set of Notorious and that she had brought it back for Hitchcock that evening. She then stepped into the audience to present him with the key, and the ailing director was visibly touched.
On their last meeting, Hitchcock was in tears, terrified of his impending death. Suffering from the cancer that would kill her, she told him, "but of course you are going to die sometime, Hitch--we are all going to die."* She later recalled that the comment seemed to bring him peace; it was a bittersweet goodbye.
Here are the two films in which Bergman and Hitchcock did their best work together.
Spellbound (1945)
Also starring: Gregory Peck, Michael Chekhov, Leo G. Carroll
In her first film with Hitchcock, Bergman plays Constance, a psychiatrist in a sanitarium. There one of her co-workers tries in vain to charm her, but only Dr. Edwards (Peck), the new head of staff can convince her that there is more to life than work. When she discovers that Edwards may not be who he says he is, she is too much in love to back out, so she uses psychoanalysis to find a solution to their troubles.
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