Ernst Ingmar Bergman
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Books
19
Awards
Ingmar Bergman was born July 14, 1918 in Uppsala, Sweden. He directed The Seventh Seal 1957 and Fanny and Alexander 1982, winning three Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film. Tax troubles forced a brief exile to Germany in 1976. He died peacefully on July 30, 2007.
Names, aliases, and relatives of Ingmar Bergman — birth name, kin, and personal ties.
Ingmar Bergman by the numbers — life, work, and family.
Ingmar Bergman — early life, career, personal life, and legacy.
His father Erik Bergman was a Lutheran minister who later became chaplain to the King of Sweden; his mother was Karin Bergman. His grandmother secretly introduced him to cinema because of his father’s strict rules. He managed a puppet theatre with his sister and friends. He studied at Stockholm University and Palmgrenska samskolan.
Torment 1944, his first screenplay, was directed by Alf Sjöberg, and he shot the final sequence. He became CEO of the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre from 1963 to 1966, hiring nearly every professional actor in Sweden. In 1976, a tax dispute forced him to leave for Germany. His last theatrical film was Fanny and Alexander 1982. He retired from filmmaking in 1984 but continued writing scripts and directing plays.
Bergman married four times: Else Fisher 1943-1944, Ellen Bergman 1945-1950, Gun Grut 1951-1959, and Käbi Laretei 1959-1969. He had a long relationship with Liv Ullmann, with whom he had daughter Linn Ullmann. He fathered nine children, including directors Daniel and Eva Bergman. He was romantically linked to actresses Harriet Andersson 1952-1955 and Bibi Andersson 1955-1959.
Bergman influenced directors such as Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, and Steven Spielberg. Time magazine chose him as the world’s greatest living filmmaker in 2005. Ten of his films appear in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. His intense psychological dramas Persona 1966 and Cries and Whispers 1972 remain among his most recognized works.
Browse the complete filmography of Ingmar Bergman — every film, TV show, and documentary credit, ranked by popularity.
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Every award, honor, and recognition received by Ingmar Bergman — Grammys, hall-of-fame inductions, civic honors, lifetime achievements.
Ingmar Bergman's bibliography — every authored, edited, and co-written book, ranked by edition count.
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A wall of memorable lines from Ingmar Bergman — lyrics, interviews, and off-the-cuff remarks captured over a lifetime.
The Theater Is Like a Faithful Wife. the Film Is the Great Adventure the Costly, Exacting Mistress.
No Form of Art Goes Beyond Ordinary Consciousness as Film Does, Straight to Our Emotions, Deep into the Twilight Room of the Soul.
I Hope I Never Get Old so I Get Religious.
In a Quarrel with One of My Sons, I Said, I Know I’ve Been a Lousy Father. He Said, a Father? You Haven’t Been a Father at All!
I Write Scripts to Serve as Skeletons Awaiting the Flesh and Sinew of Images.
Film as Dream, Film as Music. No Art Passes Our Conscience in the Way Film Does, and Goes Directly to Our Feelings, Deep Down into the Dark Rooms of Our Souls.
Everything Is Worth Precisely as Much as a Belch, the Difference Being That a Belch Is More Satisfying.
My Basic View of Things Is Not to Have Any Basic View of Things. from Having Been Exceedingly Dogmatic, My Views on Life Have Gradually Dissolved. They Don’t Exist Any Longer.
I’m Deeply Fixated on My Childhood. Some Impressions Are Extremely Vivid, Light, Smell, and All. There Are Moments When I Can Wander Through My Childhood’s Landscape, Through Rooms Long Ago, Remember How They Were Furnished, Where the Pictures Hung on the Walls, the Way the Light Fell. It’s Like a Film Little Scraps of a Film, Which I Set Running and Which I Can Reconstruct to the Last Detail Except Their Smell.
When I Was Young, I Was Extremely Scared of Dying. but Now I Think It a Very, Very Wise Arrangement. It’s Like a Light That Is Extinguished. Not Very Much to Make a Fuss About.
I’d Prostitute My Talents If It Would Further My Cause, Steal If There Was No Way Out, Killing My Friends or Anyone Else If It Would Help My Art.
I’ve Had to Learn Everything About Movies by Myself. for the Theater, I Studied with a Wonderful Old Man in Goteborg, Where I Spent Four Years. He Was a Hard, Difficult Man, but He Knew the Theater and I Learned from Him. for the Movies, However, There Was No One. Before the War, I Was a Schoolboy. Then, During the War, We Got See No Foreign Films at All. by the Time It Was Over, I Was Working Had to Support a Wife and Three Children. Before, Fortunately, I Am by Nature an Autodidact, One Who Can Teach Himself Though It’s an Uncomfortable Thing at Times. Self Taught People Sometimes Cling Too Much to the Technical Side, the Sure Side and Place Technical Perfection Too High.
New Cities Arouse Too Many Sensations in Me. They Give Me Too Many Impressions to Experience at the Same Time. They All Crowd in on Me. Being in a New City Overwhelms Me, Unsettles Me.
To Shoot a Film Is to Organize an Entire Universe.
Fellini, Kurosawa and Buñuel Move in the Same Fields as Tarkovsky. Antonioni Was on His Way, but Expired, Suffocated by His Own Tediousness.
Working in This Medium and Being a Man of the Theater, I’m Like the Common Whore. I Have an Enormous Need for People to Like Me and What I’m Doing. That It Be Accepted and Praised and so Forth. It’s Always Painful to Be Disapproved Of.
Directing Is More Fun with Women. Everything Is.
My Professor Told Me When I Started in the ’40S That a Director Should Listen and Keep His Mouth Shut. Took Me a Long Time to Understand I Talked Too Much. Now I Know You Should Listen with Your Ears and Your Heart.
Do You Know What Moviemaking Is? Eight Hours of Hard Work Each Day to Get Three Minutes of Film. and During Those Eight Hours There Are Maybe Only Ten or Twelve Minutes, If You’re Lucky, of Real Creation. and Maybe They Don’t Come. Then You Have to Gear Yourself for Another Eight Hours and Pray You’re Going to Get Your Good Ten Minutes This Time. Everything and Everyone on a Movie Set Must Be Attuned to Finding Those Minutes of Real Creativity. You’ve Got to Keep the Actors and Yourself in a Kind of Enchanted Circle. an Outside Presence, Even a Completely Friendly One, Is Basically Alien to the Intimate Process Going on in Front of Him. Any Time There’s an Outsider on the Set, We Run the Risk That Part of the Actors’ Absorption, or the Technicians’, or Mine, Is Going to Be Impinged Upon. It Takes Very Little to Destroy the Delicate Mood of Total Immersion in Our Work. We Can’t Risk Losing Those Vital Minutes of Real Creation. the Few Times I’ve Made Exceptions I’ve Always Regretted It.
If I Didn’t Have My Profession, I Think I Would Be Sitting in a Nuthouse. but I Have Been Unceasingly at Work, and This Has Been Very Healthy for Me. so I Had No Need for Therapy.
I Am Very Much Aware of My Own Double Self. the Well Known One Is Very Under Control; Everything Is Planned and Very Secure. the Unknown One Can Be Very Unpleasant. I Think This Side Is Responsible for All the Creative Work He Is in Touch with the Child. He Is Not Rational, He Is Impulsive and Extremely Emotional. Perhaps It Is Not Even a ‘He,’ but a ‘She’.
I Think I Have Just One Obsession to Touch Other Human Beings. That Desire for Contact, I Think, Was the Reason Why I Came to This Profession, Because as a Child I Was Very Shy and Very Lonely and Very Afraid of Other People. of Course, It Was Not Only This Very Beautiful Reason, but It Was Also a Longing for Power, for Manipulating Other People. I Think That’s a Disease Every Director Has a Kind of Professional Illness.
If I Cannot Be Perfect in My Life, I Will Be Perfect in My Profession. You Can’t Direct Reality, and That Sometimes Makes Me Very Insecure and Scared. but When You Direct a Picture, You Can Decide Everything. You Can Do Everything You Want, You Can Control Every Little Detail. It’s Always Handmade.
Even in the Most Tragic Scenes, There Must Be Some Sort of Joy, Some Sort of Lust. and If It’s Not There, If It’s Not Present, the Picture Is Just Boring, and That Is the Most Terrifying of All Things. When a Picture Is Boring, It’s Dead.
Little-known facts about Ingmar Bergman — origins, oddities, and behind-the-scenes details from a public life.
The film and TV series The Best Intentions 1992 shows the early marriage of his parents.
Sunday’s Children 1992 depicts a bicycle journey with his father.
In the miniseries Private Confessions 1996 the trilogy is closed, with Pernilla August playing his mother.
He managed a puppet theatre with his sister and friends.
He wrote his first play Kaspers död in 1941, which led to his entrance into the movie business.
His first job at SF was to save poor scripts, and he delivered two scripts including Torment 1944.
Torment 1944 was the first Bergman screenplay put into film, directed by Alf Sjöberg.
He shot the last sequence of Torment 1944 because Sjöberg was busy.
He was CEO of the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre from 1963 to 1966.
In 1976 he had a tax dispute and left Sweden for Germany.
He returned to Sweden and made his last theatrical film Fanny and Alexander 1982.
He died peacefully in his sleep on July 30, 2007.
His grandmother introduced him to cinema in secret.
No relation to Ingrid Bergman, though he married another Ingrid Ingrid von Rosen.
He listed Federico Fellini, Victor Sjöström and Akira Kurosawa as his most significant fellow directors.
His Top 11 films include The Circus 1928, Port of Shadows 1938, Rashomon 1950, and La Strada 1954.
He was an admirer of François Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Melville.
He died on the same day as Michelangelo Antonioni.
His favorite Hollywood director was Billy Wilder.
He married Ingrid von Rosen in 1971; it was his only marriage not ending in divorce.
He is buried on the island of Fårö.
He had romantic relationships with Harriet Andersson from 1952 to 1955 and Bibi Andersson from 1955 to 1959.
He appeared on the new 200 Kronors banknote in 2015.
He considered Persona 1966 and Cries & Whispers 1972 his best movies.
He has a daughter, Linn Ullmann, with actress Liv Ullmann.
He was voted the 8th Greatest Film Director of all time by Entertainment Weekly.
He was fluent in French.
His films The Virgin Spring 1960, Through a Glass Darkly 1961 and Fanny and Alexander 1982 each won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
During the 1951 strike, he directed TV commercials for a soap called Bris.
He retired from filmmaking in 1984 and from directing plays in 2003.
He liked to watch BMX racing on television.
He and Max von Sydow made 13 movies together, including The Seventh Seal 1957 and The Virgin Spring 1960.
For many years he had an hour-long telephone conversation with actor Erland Josephson every Saturday.
He fathered nine children.
He had an intense dislike of animals, which is why they are sometimes seen dead in his films.
He directed Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Bergman to Oscar nominations.
Time magazine chose him as the world’s greatest living filmmaker in 2005.
The rock band Van Halen wrote a song called The Seventh Seal in honor of his films.
His three favorite movies are The Emigrants 1971, La Dolce Vita 1960 and Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday 1953.
He published Tre dagböcker, diaries of himself, his fifth wife Ingrid, and daughter Maria.
He was among Woody Allen’s biggest idols.
He was approached by Italian television to make a TV-movie about Jesus Christ, but Franco Zeffirelli eventually directed Jesus of Nazareth 1977.
On IMDb, he is the first director, labeled as 0000005.
He lived on the island of Fårö since the early 1960s.
He inspired the word Bergmanesque.
His father Erik was a Lutheran minister who became chaplain to the King of Sweden.
He and Ingrid Thulin made 10 movies together, including Winter Light 1963 and Cries & Whispers 1972.
He often directed plays for the radio.
His daughter Anna married a former London policeman.
He fluently spoke Swedish, French and English.
In 2002, he donated his raw footage, photographs and manuscripts to a new foundation.
Quick answers to the questions readers ask most about Ingmar Bergman.
Celebrities similar to Ingmar Bergman — same craft, ranked by reach.
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