Candice Bergen recalls accidentally starting restaurant fire as a teen in Switzerland

Actress Candice Bergen has shared the story of accidentally setting fire to a famous restaurant while attending boarding school in Switzerland at age 14.

Speaking on Ted Danson’s Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast, Bergen said she secretly went out with older classmates to a restaurant in Gstaad, where they were eating meat fondue. She poured wine into the hot cooking fat, causing flames to shoot up to the ceiling and ignite a curtain. Everyone was safely evacuated, and the restaurant was later repaired and reopened.

Bergen said she was banned from going out for the rest of the school year. Years later, after returning to Gstaad with her husband, a ski instructor recognized her as “the woman who burned down the Olden,” showing the incident had not been forgotten.

The actress also recalled in her memoir Knock Wood that her parents were shocked by how much she had changed while living in Switzerland, where she had taken up drinking and smoking. They eventually brought her home to Beverly Hills.