From: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...&refer=home

Ingmar Bergman, Director and Cinema Icon, Dies at 89 (Update2)

By Janina Pfalzer and Benedikt Kammel

Ingmar Bergman July 30 (Bloomberg) -- Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish film director whose depiction of anguished human relationships made him an icon of the art-house cinema and inspired followers including Woody Allen, has died. He was 89.

Bergman died today at his home on the isle of Faaroe, off Sweden's east coast, the Swedish Film Institute said in a statement. In his lifetime, he directed more than 50 movies, wrote scripts for another dozen, and was responsible for 168 works for the stage, television and radio.

``This is an enormous loss, not only for artistic Sweden but because he was one of the most well-known Swedes in the world,'' Jon Asp, a spokesman at the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, said in a telephone interview today. ``Had it not been for his struggles in the 40s and 50s, Swedish directors such as Jan Troell and Bo Widerberg may not have been able to make films.''

During a career spanning eight decades, Bergman developed a body of work known for austere drama with recurring themes such as art, faith and the meaning of life. Three of his movies won Academy Awards for best foreign language film and one, ``Fanny and Alexander'' in 1982, grabbed four awards. It was also the beginning of a 21-year hiatus in his film making.

Before spending his final years in seclusion on the windswept Baltic island of Faaroe, Bergman made his last film, ``Saraband,'' in 2003. It was greeted in a review by Time magazine as ``the last roar from a legend,'' a work that showed he was still ``the greatest living filmmaker,'' with a gift for finding ``universal significance in his private agonies.''

Chess with Death

His international breakthrough had come in 1956, when ``Smiles of a Summer Night'' won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. A love comedy set among the Swedish upper class, the film was still ``a reaction to his icy delvings into the human soul,'' Peter Cowie wrote in ``Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography.''

The success of ``Smiles of a Summer Night'' allowed Bergman to turn away from the comedies that made his name and to direct ``The Seventh Seal,'' possibly his best-known and most- celebrated film. The story, about crusaders returning to a Sweden plagued by the Black Death, was a religious allegory that pointed toward a run of existential films by Bergman.

The 1957 movie also launched the international career of actor Max von Sydow, whose knight dares Death to a game of chess as he tries to stave off the inevitable. The image of Death in ``The Seventh Seal,'' portrayed as a man in a hooded black robe with a white-painted face, has been both paraphrased and parodied in films ranging from Monty Python's ``The Meaning of Life'' to ``Last Action Hero,'' an action comedy with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Swedish Followers

U.S. director Woody Allen holds ``The Seventh Seal'' as his favorite movie ever. In a New York Times review of Bergman's 1988 autobiography, ``The Magic Lantern,'' Allen called the Swede ``a master with an inspired personal style; an artist of deep concern and intellect, whose films would prove equal to great European literature.''

Bergman's oeuvre inspired Swedish directors including Troell and Widerberg. Troell's 1972 movie ``The Emigrants'', starring Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann as two Swedes who emigrated to the U.S. during the great famines of the 1850s, was nominated for an Academy Award. Widerberg's films earned him accolades at the annual Berlin Festival and an Oscar nomination for ``All Things Fair'' as best foreign movie.

Allen's Praise

Aside from the recurring themes in his movies, Bergman's work is signified by the repeated use of similar images, such as clocks and mirrors, environments and names of characters. He was consistent to such a degree that film critics still use the word ``Bergmanesque,'' though much of the time only to denote any film depicting painful relationships.

``Bergman evolved a style to deal with the human interior, and he alone among directors has explored the soul's battlefield to the fullest,'' Allen wrote in the Sept. 18, 1988, article. ``With impunity he put his camera on faces for unconscionable periods of time while actors and actresses wrestled with their anguish.''

Bergman, who cut a gaunt figure sporting a beret and a goatee in his early years, frequently referred to the ``demons'' that haunted his inner life, as well as his constant sufferings from stomach ailments. ``Flocks of black birds often come and keep me company: anxiety, rage, shame, regret and boredom,'' he wrote in the 1987 autobiography. He called exercising his profession a ``pedantic administration of the unspeakable.''

Haunted by Demons

An early Bergman mentor, Carl Anders Dymling, called him ``high-strung'' and ``short-tempered,'' characteristics that showed when he punched a reviewer from the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter in 1969. On the other hand, his actors considered him kind and compassionate, and Bergman became known for skilful portrayals of women in films such ``Summer With Monika'' (1953).

That film also drew crowds wanting to catch a glimpse of nude scenes with Harriet Andersson, the first in a series of leading ladies with whom Bergman had love affairs, straining his five marriages to women including Else Fisher, his first wife, and Kaebi Laretei, an Estonian-born pianist. He remained married to Ingrid Karlebo -- a woman with whom he had a child in 1959 -- from 1971 until her death in 1995.

Bergman only publicly acknowledged his daughter by Ingrid, Maria von Rosen, in 2004 when they published a book together. His nine children include Linn Ullmann, the novelist daughter of Norwegian-born actress Liv Ullmann.

Nine Children

The son of a priest, Bergman described his own childhood as based on concepts such as sin and confession, punishment in the form of brutal floggings, forgiveness and grace. Bergman settled the score with his father, Erik, with the partly autobiographical ``Fanny and Alexander,'' where a stern, Lutheran bishop torments his stepchildren.

Bergman said his authoritarian upbringing may have contributed to an ``astonishing acceptance of Nazism'' before World War II, a stance for which he was later deeply apologetic.

He was born July 14, 1918, in Uppsala, and moved 50 miles (80 kilometers) south to Stockholm two years later. While not poor, the family had some trouble making ends meet in his early years, a circumstance that improved in 1924 when Bergman's father was appointed chaplain to the Royal Hospital.

In the account of his childhood, Bergman says he was a sickly boy who suffered from ``several indefinable illnesses and could never really decide whether I wanted to live at all.'' At the age of 10, Bergman began to visit the theater, and after trading his brother 100 tin soldiers for a cinematograph, he was struck with ``a fever that has never left me.''

University Stint

Bergman made only a brief attempt at university studies and directed his first amateur play in 1938. A year later, he was employed as an assistant director at Stockholm's opera house after being turned down for a job at the Swedish capital's Dramatic Theater, for which he became the manager in 1963.

Three films made just before that appointment, the ``trilogy of God's silence,'' are often considered Bergman's greatest achievements as an artist. ``Through a Glass Darkly,'' ``Winter Light'' and ``The Silence'' all experimented with ascetic visuals, intense close-ups and limited dialogue.

In ``Persona'' (1966), Bergman developed those themes with cinematographer Sven Nykvist, a longtime collaborator and two- time Academy Award winner. Nykvist died in 2006. For Bergman, the film was also significant for personal reasons: It was his first starring Liv Ullmann, who bore him Linn and remained a friend, and it was shot on Faaroe, or Sheep Island, where he was building a house.

Love for Faaroe

``If one wished to be solemn, it could be said that I had found my landscape, my real home. If one wished to be funny, one could talk about love at first sight,'' Bergman wrote in ``The Magic Lantern.''

Bergman shot seven films on Faaroe, a limestone island off Sweden's east coast, and he took refuge there when accused of tax crimes in 1976, before going into exile in Germany for some years. The charges against Bergman were dropped.

During the years abroad, he directed ``Autumn Sonata'' in 1978, with Swedish Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman in her second- to-last role. Ingrid Bergman, not a relation, died of cancer in 1982.

Ullmann and another actor who stayed close to Bergman, Erland Josephson, featured in a number of 1970s films in which Bergman focused on tortured families, including ``Cries and Whispers,'' ``Scenes From a Marriage'' and ``Face to Face.'' Bergman revisited the characters from ``Scenes'' in ``Saraband,'' casting both Ullmann and Josephson.

Bergman is survived by children Lena, Eva, Anna, Mats, Ingmar and Daniel -- who all bear his last name -- Maria von Rosen and Linn Ullmann. A date for the funeral has not yet been set, and close family and friends will attend Bergman's burial, newspaper Svenska Dagbladet reported, without saying where it obtained the information.

To contact the reporters on this story: Janina Pfalzer in Stockholm at [email protected] ; Benedikt Kammel in Stockholm at [email protected] .

Last Updated: July 30, 2007 07:06 EDT

Oh no what terrible news. My thoughts and prayers go out to his family

Thanks for posting Scooter