As one legend playing another, Ingrid Bergman gives a shattering portrayal of Golda Meir, the first female prime minister of Israel. In fact, the film is shot through with drama, both onscreen and off, as the viewer is reminded that this fearless performance, for which Bergman won an Emmy, was her last; she died just three months after the film was aired in 1982. The biography of Meir is well known, and well told here: The daughter of Ukrainian refugees, she grew up in Milwaukee, and became involved in Zionist politics at an early age. She and her husband moved to a kibbutz in Palestine in the '20s--and there she focused her life on helping to establish a Jewish homeland in Israel.  The supporting cast is splendid, with Judy Davis playing the young idealist Golda, and Leonard Nimoy, never better, playing Golda's politically active, and always supportive, husband. But the film belongs to Bergman, who so completely inhabits the look and mannerisms of Meir that she seems to fit comfortably inside Meir's skin. Gone is any trace of the glamorous movie star--but in its place is something even more compelling, and ultimately more beautiful: a performance haunting, powerful, and unquestionably inspirational. --A.T. Hurley