[Archive 2007-07-30] Ingmar Bergman dies at age 89

Historical archive — originally published 2007-07-30. This report records what was known on that date. It is not current news; subsequent events may have changed the situation. Wikinews closed in May 2026.

Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, a filmmaker widely regarded as one of the great masters of modern cinema, died today at his home on Fårö, Gotland, Sweden. He was 89. The exact cause of death is not known.

Born Ernst Ingmar Bergman in 1918 in Uppsala, Sweden to a Lutheran minister of Danish descent, Bergman grew up surrounded by religious imagery and discussion. He had a strict upbringing and went through two five-month stretches of mandatory military service. He attended Stockholm High School and Stockholm University, without completing his degree in literature and art. He instead became interested in theatre and later in film.

Despite his devout upbringing, Bergman said that he lost his faith at age eight but did not come to terms with this until later in his filmmaking career.

Since the early sixties Bergman lived much of his life on the island of Fårö, where he made a number of his films. In 2004 he said he would never again leave the island.

Although Bergman was universally famous for his contribution to cinema, he was an active and productive stage director all his life, and was manager and director of a number of the most prestigious theatres in Sweden.

As a director, Bergman favored intuition over intellect, and chose to be unaggressive in dealing with actors. Bergman saw himself as having a great responsibility toward them, viewing them as collaborators often in a psychologically vulnerable position. He stated that a director must be both honest and supportive in order to allow others their best work.

His films usually deal with existential questions of mortality, loneliness, and faith; they also tend to be direct and not overtly stylized. Persona, one of Bergman's most famous films, is unusual among Bergman's work in being both existentialist and avant-garde.

Bergman usually wrote his own scripts, thinking about them for months or years before starting the actual process of writing, which he viewed as somewhat tedious. His earlier films are carefully structured, and are either based on his plays or written in collaboration with other authors.

Bergman stated that in his later works, when on occasion his actors would want to do things differently from his own intentions, he would let them, noting that the results were often "disastrous" when he did not do so. As his career progressed, Bergman increasingly let his actors improvise their dialogue. In his latest films, he wrote just the ideas informing the scene and allowed his actors to determine exact dialogue.

Ingmar Bergman, who made over 50 films, rarely watched them. "I don't watch my own films very often. I become so jittery and ready to cry ... and miserable. I think it's awful," Bergman said.

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