Film director Ingmar Bergman dies at 89

It was in the Swedish capital that Bergman broke into the world of drama, starting with a menial job at the Royal Opera House after dropping out of college.

Bergman was hired by the script department of Swedish Film Industry, the country’s main production company, as an assistant script writer in 1942.

In 1944, his first original screenplay was filmed by Alf Sjoeberg, the dominant Swedish film director of the time. “Torment” won several awards including the Grand Prize of the 1946 Cannes Film Festival, and soon Bergman was directing an average of two films a year as well as working with stage production.

After the acclaimed “The Seventh Seal,” he quickly came up with another success in “Wild Strawberries,” in which an elderly professor’s car trip to pick up an award is interspersed with dreams.

Other noted films include “Persona,” about an actress and her nurse whose identities seem to merge, and “The Autumn Sonata,” about a concert pianist and her two daughters, one severely handicapped and the other burdened by her child’s drowning.

Prominent stage director
Though best known internationally for his films, Bergman was also a prominent stage director. He worked at several playhouses in Sweden from the mid-1940s, including the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm which he headed from 1963 to 1966. He staged many plays by the Swedish author August Strindberg, whom he cited as an inspiration.

Gunnar Seijbold / AP Ingmar Bergman, in 1998, remained active later in life with stage productions and occasional TV shows. He said he still felt a need to direct.

The influence of Strindberg’s grueling and precise psychological dissections could be seen in “Scenes From a Marriage,” an intense detailing of the disintegration of a marriage that was released as a feature film in 1974.

Bergman showed his lighter side in the following year’s “The Magic Flute,” again first produced for TV. It is a fairly straight production of the Mozart opera, enlivened by touches such as repeatedly showing the face of a young girl watching the opera and comically clumsy props and costumes.

Bergman remained active later in life with stage productions and occasional TV shows. He said he still felt a need to direct, although he had no plans to make another feature film.

Bergman, at age 84, started production on “Saraband” — based on the two main characters from “Scenes From a Marriage” — in the fall of 2002.

In a rare news conference, he said he wrote the story after realizing he was “pregnant with a play.”

“At first I felt sick, very sick. It was strange. Like Abraham and Sarah, who suddenly realized she was pregnant,” he said, referring to biblical characters. “It was lots of fun, suddenly to feel this urge returning.”

Battle over taxes
Bergman waged a fight against real-life tormentors: Sweden’s powerful tax authorities.

In 1976, during a rehearsal at the Royal Dramatic Theater, police came to take Bergman away for interrogation about tax evasion. The director, who had left all finances to be handled by a lawyer, was questioned for hours while his home was searched. When released, he was forbidden to leave the country.

The case caused an enormous uproar in the media and Bergman had a mental breakdown that sent him to hospital for over a month. He later was absolved of all accusations and in the end only had to pay some extra taxes.

In his autobiography he admitted to guilt in only one aspect: “I signed papers that I didn’t read, even less understood.”

The experience made him go into voluntary exile in Germany, to the embarrassment of the Swedish authorities. After nine years, he returned to Stockholm.

The date of Bergman’s funeral has not been set, but will be attended by a close group of friends and family, the TT news agency reported.

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