☛ LIFE magazine: Movie ― “Ingrid Bergman Takes A Short Holiday From Hollywood”, photographs by Bob Landry, February 24, 1941, p. 46 (PDF). Original captions read: “Told to avoid ski trick till her movie is completed, Ingrid gets some fun popping snowballs at her husbands”. All large formats retrieved from Bergmania © Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.

In February 1941, Ingrid Bergman is 25 years old (she will turn 26 in August of the same year). She has been in the United-States for two years now. At that time she’s still married to her first husband Petter Lindström (she will divorce him in 1950 in order to get remarried with Italian director Roberto Rossellini). About a year after those photos were taken, she played Ilsa Lund alongside Humphrey Bogart (as Rick Blaine) in Casablanca (1942, IMDb). It’s still considered to be her most notorious role. Even though her first American film was a success ―Intermezzo in 1939 (IMDb)― the three films that followed were not as popular. When LIFE magazine met with her during this winter holiday of 1941, Bergman is still in the process of being introduced to the American public:

Ingrid Bergman is Sweden’s most promising export to the U.S. since Greta Garbo. At first she did not want to leave her native Stockholm. She had there an enviable reputation as a stage and screen actress, a fine big Swedish doctor for a husband, and a baby daughter. She did not see what else Hollywood had to offer.

But Producer David O. Selznick (Gone With The Wind, Rebecca) saw her in a Swedish film called Intermezzo and could not rest until, with promise of handsome pay and glorious future, he had her under contract. She arrived in the U.S. 21 months ago. Like her famous countrywoman she was exceedingly tall and exceedingly beautiful. Unlike Garbo, she eschewed mystery and glamor, met interviewers with a directness and sincerity that toot them off their feet. Her first Hollywood movie, Intermezzo [a remake of the Swedish version of 1936], in English (1939), won comment mainly for her honest acting.

Since then she has been learning English, acting on Broadway (Liliom, 1940), starring in Columbia’s Adam Had Four Sons, to be released March 1. Between final revisions of this film she took, at end of January, a brief ski holyday with her husband, here from Stockholm on a visit. Together they drove 600 miles north to the California-Nevada border where, at little-known June Lake, the two ski-wise Swedes found snow dry and frozen enough for sport. (p. 46)

All the photographs shown here were taken by long-time LIFE photographer Bob Landry. Landry covered Hollywood stars and documented the Second Wolrd war as well. One can browse some of the photos he took for LIFE magazine at Google Images.