Ingrid Bergman was a multilingual, Academy Award-winning actress born in Stockholm, conversant in Swedish, German, English, Italian, and French. She had been preparing for an acting career all her life. After her mother Frieda died when she was three years old, she was raised by her father Justus Samuel Bergman, a professional photographer who encouraged her to pose and act in front of the camera. As a young woman, she was shy, taller than the average women of her generation, and somewhat overweight. Acting allowed her to transcend these constraints, enabling her to transform herself into a character. She first appeared as an uncredited extra in the film Landskamp (1932), and was accepted into the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm as a scholarship student in 1933.