Ingmar Bergman(1918-2007)
- Writer
- Director
- Actor
Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born July 14, 1918, the son of a
priest. The film and T.V. series,
The Best Intentions (1992) is
biographical and shows the early marriage of his parents. The film
Sunday's Children (1992) depicts a bicycle journey with his father. In the
miniseries
Private Confessions (1996)
is the trilogy closed. Here, as in
'Den
Goda Viljan' Pernilla August
play his mother. Note that all three movies are not always full true
biographical stories. He began his career early with a puppet theatre
which he, his sister and their friends played with. But he was the
manager. Strictly professional he begun writing in 1941. He had written
a play called 'Kaspers död' (A.K.A. 'Kaspers Death') which was produced
the same year. It became his entrance into the movie business as Stina
Bergman (not a close relative), from the company S.F. (Swedish
Filmindustry), had seen the play and thought that there must be some
dramatic talent in young Ingmar. His first job was to save other more
famous writers' poor scripts. Under one of that script-saving works he
remembered that he had written a novel about his last year as a
student. He took the novel, did the save-poor-script job first, then
wrote a screenplay on his own novel. When he went back to S.F., he
delivered two scripts rather than one. The script was
Torment (1944) and was the fist Bergman
screenplay that was put into film (by
Alf Sjöberg). It was also in that movie
Bergman did his first professional film-director job. Because Alf
Sjöberg was busy, Bergman got the order to shoot the last sequence of
the film. Ingmar Bergman is the father of Daniel Bergman, director, and
Mats Bergman, actor at the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theater. Ingmar
Bergman was also C.E.O. of the same theatre between 1963-1966, where he
hired almost every professional actor in Sweden. In 1976 he had a
famous tax problem. Bergman had trusted other people to advise him on
his finances, but it turned out to be very bad advice. Bergman had to
leave the country immediately, and so he went to Germany. A few years
later he returned to Sweden and made his last theatrical film
Fanny and Alexander (1982). In later life he retired from movie
directing, but still wrote scripts for film and T.V. and directed plays
at the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre for many years. He died
peacefully in his sleep on July 30, 2007.