Scenes from life
A brief overview of Ingmar Bergman’s life and career.
Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala in 1918 to a conservative Lutheran priest and his wife. Childhood was a difficult time for Bergman. Bergman and his siblings were kept under strict discipline, which reinforced Bergman”s tendency to seek solace in the imaginary world. From a young age, he was aware of the power of images and his interest in visual expression was sealed by the magic lantern, a kind of precursor to the slide projector that he played with as a child.
As a young man, Bergman was fascinated by the Nazi ideology, but ended up studying visual arts and literature at Stockholm University. He used his student years to deepen his knowledge of film, theatre – and love. He wrote several plays as a student. After graduating, Bergman was employed as a trainee director at a Stockholm theatre and continued his theatrical career for two decades at the city theatres of Helsingborg (1943–46), Gothenburg (1946–49) and Malmö (1953–58), as well as at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm (1960–66).
At the same time as his theatrical work, Bergman promoted his film career, which made him one of the most influential film directors of the 20th century. Bergman began writing film scripts in the early 1940s while living on the island of Fårö and progressed to directing a few years later. In the 1950s, Bergman achieved international success with his film A Midsummer Night’s Smile (1955), which was quickly followed by The Seventh Seal (1957) and The Strawberry Place (1957). Over the next two decades, Bergman directed a trilogy on religion (Like a Mirror 1960, Winter Light 1962, Silence 1962) and many of his most famous films, such as Persona (1966), Autumn Sonata (1978) and the TV series Scenes from a Marriage (1973).
In 1976, Bergman was accused of tax evasion in Sweden and moved to work at the Residenztheater in Munich. The charges against Bergman were later dropped, but Bergman was so furious at the public humiliation he faced that he canceled his planned work in Sweden, closed his studio on Fårö and lived in Germany for the next seven years.
Bergman was married five times, in addition to which he had affairs with three actresses who had starred in his films, including Liv Ullmann. In addition to his daughter, Linn Ullmann, born of this relationship, Bergman has eight children.
Bergman’s longest relationship was with Ingrid von Rosen , who was his wife from 1971 until von Rosen’s death in 1995. Bergman lived his last years in Sweden and retired from his film career in 2003. Bergman died in his sleep at his home on Fårö in 2007, on the same day as the Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni. Bergman was 89 years old at the time of his death.
Source: Ingmar Bergman Foundation