Cecil Smith, drama critic of the Los Angeles Times, conducts this exclusive interview with stage and screen star Ingrid Bergman. Miss Bergman has just concluded a six-week run in Los Angeles in Eugene O'Neill's "More Stately Mansions." The production opened at the Broadhurst in New York City on October 31. This is the last new O'Neill play to reach the boards in the U.S. and was put in playable form by the director Jose Quintero, working from an almost completed but extremely long text by America's late great playwright. Miss Bergman says she is happy the play is being done, even though the final editing is not by O'Neill himself. She is especially glad to be in it, though it is 25 years later than originally planned. She had first met O'Neill in 1941, following appearances in "Anna Christie" in Santa Barbara and San Francisco. He had shown her the manuscripts-in-progress for his cycle of 9 or more plays, to be called "A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed," and asked her if she would be part of his repertory company to perform the cycle over a 6-year period. Though greatly flattered by his offer, Miss Bergman was obliged by her film commitments to refuse. Today she says it was like the voice of "someone from the beyond" when the script was offered to her by Quintero earlier in the year. She discusses the production, in L.A.'s vast Ahmanson Theatre of 2100 seats, which to her feels like singing at the opera - a task she undertook once, playing Honegger's oratorio "Joan at the Stake" at La Scala, Covent Garden, and the Paris and Stockholm Operas. She admits that she is never ready in a role opening night, feeling rather that she is about where the other actors were after two weeks of rehearsal, inasmuch as the language is not her native tongue. "You use altogether different muscles, to speak another language, and it is usually a month after opening before I feel fully ready to think only about what the words mean." Speaking of her early career in Sweden, Miss Bergman lays to rest the fable of her having written, directed, and acted in a play at the age of 15. She also describes the training at the Royal Academy in Stockholm. She speaks of roles she would like to do - Greek tragic heroines like Elektra, Shakespearean ones like Portia - and comedy, which no one seems to want to let her do - the mother in "Barefoot in the Park,- and Lauren Bacall's role in "Cactus Flower." But she has no future plans after "More Stately Mansions," other than to return to her husband in Paris. "I have been very lucky, the roles have always seemed just to come, at the right time - and I have never played a minor part." This is her first performance in the U.S. in 21 years, and she will stay a total of 6 months.