Film legend Bergman dies aged 89

Film legend Bergman dies aged 89

Xan Brooks and agencies
Monday July 30, 2007

The legendary Swedish film-maker Ingmar Bergman died this morning at his home on the island of Faro. According to his daughter, Eve, the director of The Seventh Seal and Persona died peacefully in his sleep. He was 89.

Having initially trained on the stage, Bergman went on to direct nearly 50 feature films, beginning with Crisis in 1946. His breakthrough came in 1957, courtesy of an extraordinary double-headed triumph of Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal. He would go on to win three best foreign language film Oscars, for The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly and Fanny and Alexander.

Such was Bergman's stark, uncompromising vision that he found himself a byword for existential gloom, a man whose films offered a pitiless vision of a Godless universe. Yet while there is no denying the serious nature of Bergman's work, the stereotype conveniently ignored the lush eroticism of films shown in films such as Summer With Monika, or the joyous comedy that runs through Smiles of a Summer Night or A Lesson in Love.

A frequent sufferer of depression, the director knew the importance of keeping his demons at arm's length. "If I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my advantage," he said. "Lilies often grown out of carcasses' arseholes."

Bergman officially retired from film-making with his flamboyant, semi-autobiographical family fable Fanny and Alexander in 1982. However, he went on to make a belated swansong with the made-for-TV drama Saraband in 1982. The film reunited him with two of his favourite actors, Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson. Ulmann was also the mother of one of Bergman's daughters, Linn.

In later years, Bergman rarely left his home on the remote Swedish island of Faro and earned a reputation as a recluse, a stern old magus locked away from all but his nearest and dearest. In the course of a rare interview in 2004, he admitted that his own personal favourites of his films were Winter Light, Persona and Cries and Whispers. However, he added that he now rarely watched any of his movies because he found them "too depressing".

A colossus of world cinema, Ingmar Bergman influenced a generation of film-makers who were inspired both by his effortless command of the medium and his high-minded sense of its moral and artistic possibilities. In 1988, Woody Allen hailed him as "probably the greatest artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera."

"Ingmar Bergman was one of the great directors of cinema," British film-maker Michael Winterbottom told the Guardian today. "He was a man of great integrity, homesty and energy ... It's impossible to imagine anyone contributing more to the history of cinema." Before going on to direct features himself, Winterbottom was responsible for a major Bergman documentary, The Magic Lantern, in the 1989.

Bergman was married five times and had nine children. A date for his funeral, which will be attended by family and close friends, has yet to be set.