There is a tide in the affairs of men and women which, taken just before the flood—the first best-seller, the first million, the sudden accession to Hollywood stardom—can sluice out truths that may forever after be obscured by the public image of The Success.

Such a tide is now at hand in the life of Ingrid Thulin, in the judgment of many the most beautiful Swedish actress to come to these shores since Ingrid Bergman. She has behind her a first-rate career of 13 years on the European stage and screen, including five years as a leading lady in the films of prize-winning director Ingmar Bergman (no relation to the Bergman already mentioned). But before her lies, as a result of her role in M-G-M's new version of The Four Horsemen, the very great possibility of American stardom. And that is quite another matter.

Shortly after Miss Thulin finished The Four Horsemen and while she was in New York on her way back to Sweden, I sat down with her for a few hours over an avocado salad and a lamb chop, to discuss what happens nowadays when a European artist hits Hollywood. It was an enviable experience.

For one thing, there is her beauty, even more surpassing in real life than on the screen. For only by seeing her in person can you appreciate the stunning contrast of her white-gold hair and rich hazel-brown eyes...and that expression of happiest sadness about the corners of her mouth for which men climb preposterous mountains.

For another thing, there is an honesty and warmth in her which one rarely finds in his closest friends, let alone in a movie star. She is ardent, candid, interested in everything—now talking, with her hands flying about like appendages of a Rube Goldberg machine; now silent and thoughtful, as she searches for words to frame some new idea that has just come to her. But whether the words come excitedly or thoughtfully, they seem always to be deeply honest.

Ingrid Thulin appears to be, in short, the kind of woman who never has to change herself—her thoughts or her looks—for the occasion.

For instance, the last time I interviewed her, which was two years ago in a small coffee house in New York's Greenwich Village, she was wearing slacks and canvas shoes. This time, at the Plaza, she had thrown a cloth coat over a casual dress.

She ignores glamour. Both times her hair was pulled back into a simple knot, the way she wears it in many of her films, and she wore no makeup except lipstick.

She is now about 30 years old. And I expect that, basically, she's much the same sort of person as when, at 16, she left her small home town of Sollefteå on the central coast of Sweden to go to secretarial school in Stockholm. (Her studio biography says that when she changed her mind and went to dramatic school instead, she worked nights in an office to pay back the loan her family had given her for the secretarial school.)

Then she won a membership in the Royal Swedish Dramatic School and, since the school is subsidized by the government, her financial troubles were over.

She went on to the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm (it's also subsidized), where Ingmar Bergman discovered her. They had both been poor, they were both still poor by American standards, but now both were recognized as artists on the Continent (she for her stage roles, he for films like Three Strange Loves, The Naked Night, and The Seventh Seal).

Then Bergman put her in the films Wild Strawberries, The Magician, and Brink of Life, and both actress and director attained great popularity in the art theatres in this country.

Now Bergman's The Virgin Spring has won Hollywood's Oscar for the best foreign film of 1960. It and some of the other Bergman films, including those starring Ingrid Thulin, are playing to record audiences in drive-ins throughout the United States. And it is safe to predict that even larger audiences will see her in The Four Horsemen, scheduled for release this September.

If you were around in the '20s, you may remember that the original Four Horsemen, based on the novel by Vicente Blasco Ibanez, was one of the pictures that rocketed Rudolph Valentino to immortality. The new version has been updated, its action taking place during World War II instead of World War I. Glenn Ford plays Valentino's role and Ingrid Thulin the one played by Alice Terry.

In M-G-M's advance publicity about The Four Horsemen, there are hints that may yet pre-sell Ingrid Thulin as a new Garbo.

I asked her what she thought about this.

"It is nonsense," she said. "It is impossible." Then, in her just barely off-balance English, she added, "I can't think of anyone who would be as great to look at like that, not even a hundred years forward."

I asked her next how she was approached by Hollywood, and to compare Hollywood-style filming to making movies with Bergman.

"M-G-M sent me the script in Sweden," she said, "and then they sent people who talked about it and the part was not bad—a married woman, a Parisienne who has a love affair with another man, a neutral, an Argentine, in Paris, during the war.

"And she has fun with him trying to forget the war—though very proud, all the same, of her husband who is in the war. Later it turns out they are actually both in the war, the Resistance. A complicated and interesting situation for me. So I took an agent in Hollywood. Paul Kohner. And then the people came from M-G-M in the summer of 1960 to get me.

"They arrived in Stockholm and I was sure I couldn't come. I was rehearsing Strindberg's Miss Julie for the new Stockholms Stadsteater and I was going to be the one to open the Stadsteater and I was very proud of that. But they said they were already starting Four Horsemen on location in Paris. I told them I couldn't leave Miss Julie.

"So the M-G-M went to the president of the Stadsteater and said they didn't care about money and how much would it be to buy the Stadsteater! To get me, you see. It is a public-owned theatre, you understand—and they try to buy it. To buy me!"

She interrupted her narrative to allow for a wholly uncharacteristic giggle. "So the president of the Stadsteater, he thought a little and then named a figure—a fantastic figure. They got all upset and said no. The president laughed and came to me and said: 'But they were insisting they didn't care about money!'

"And that is how it turned out that I could perform Miss Julie in Stockholm and then come down a month late to join them in the shooting in Paris."

By that time René Hubert had created a wardrobe of 23 dresses for her, with M-G-M flying them back and forth from Hollywood to Stockholm for approval on both sides. Hairdresser Sidney Guilaroff had been flown in from London, and they were making test shots of Miss Thulin, in her new coiffures and new costumes, in the studio Ingmar Bergman uses near Stockholm.

It must have been something like staging a production of the Radio City Rockettes in a 13th century guild hall. For Bergman's studios are a very small group of ancient buildings in the middle of the park in which many of the scenes in his movies are set.

When Bergman works there, he has to use a camera so ancient and battered that blankets are draped around it to keep its racket off the sound track. (Yet it is hard to find in a Hollywood movie sound tracks, or photography, with the purity of Bergman's.) For a Bergman film, Ingrid Thulin gets the Swedish equivalent of $5000. For The Four Horsemen, it is reported she received $80,000.

I asked whether Bergman had happened to drop in during this luxurious Hollywood-in-Sweden interlude.

"He came down," the actress answered. "He saw me in all those clothes. I said 'You know, they are crazy. Just look at this big show.' Ingmar Bergman said: 'You just keep up the show.' He likes it very much that the girls in his pictures are going around the world and doing things.

"The actors in Sweden are so really poor, you know," said Ingrid Thulin, "and now all these amazing things are happening to us. And that is good. But not completely good, I think."

I asked why. "Well," she said, "Hollywood means Cinemascope. The Four Horsemen will be in Cinemascope."

"For the story of woman," she says, "you need a smaller screen." She has very strong feelings about many things—particularly about the role of women in the modern world.

At the same time, she was quite ready to volunteer that director Vincente Minnelli had used the wide screen to create some magnificent scenes in The Four Horsemen.

One, especially, she called "Incredible." It involved 700 people milling about a railroad station. And for about 500 of those people he created individual movements.

But it took three days to film that one scene. "Everything takes such a long time with Hollywood," says Miss Thulin. "I was never in a picture before that took more than two and a half months from start to finish. The Four Horsemen took six months. All that waiting, waiting, waiting! It must be like it is for a man when he's in the army."

She said The Four Horsemen was five hours long before cutting and editing—it will emerge at two or two and a half hours. Bergman shoots a two hour film, then cuts it to one and a half hours.

And Bergman, she noted, "never builds a whole room. If he needs a corner, he has them build only the corner he needs. But in Hollywood, they build a whole house and then they take one wall out when they come in in the morning.

"It is a waste," she said with true Continental frugality. "That is bad."

On the subject of colour (The Four Horsemen is, of course, in colour) she also has some ideas.

"Colour is all right for musicals," she said, "or for Japanese films, where they use it psychologically. But black and white is better if you're trying to be realistic."

Which, it developed, is one of the reasons she and her husband (he is Harry Schein, an Austrian-born Swedish writer, film critic and wealthy business man who rather resembles the Bergman star Gunnar Björnstrand) were on their way back to Sweden. She will get a much-needed rest, then go to work on another black and white Bergman film.

"What about returning to Hollywood?" I asked. (She has two contracts, one with Mirisch Brothers, another with M-G-M. Each calls for one picture every year for five years.) The dazzling Miss Thulin, it appears, is going to commute between Hollywood and Stockholm. She is not, as yet, ready to give up either Sweden or her association with Bergman.

"And what," I asked, "if the end result of The Four Horsemen is that you become a big, big Hollywood star?"

"I don't know," said Ingrid Thulin. "In many ways it is much better back in Sweden. There are so few people in the movie industry there and you know everybody. You can see them in the studio. You know their names—both their first and second names.

"I don't know if it's possible to become a big star and still live in Sweden. Some people wouldn't like it. I don't know what I would do," said the girl who may become America's newest star, "I just don't know."