Ingmar Bergman

Swedish film director, a prestigiously productive and creative artist whose lens focused darkly on landscapes of tormented guilt and neurosis with only the occasional smile on a summer night. His preeminence is largely due to his "ability to attach my demons to my chariots," as he did ruthlessly. As an author, he has completed novels, memoirs and descriptions of his first love, the theater. His four decades of filmmaking reaped Oscars for "The Virgin Spring," "Through a Glass Darkly," "Cries and Whispers," and "Fanny and Alexander." As a child, he was sent to live with his grandmother after his mother died and before his father remarried. By age 12, when he discovered the magic lantern, cinema, his need for order and his love for magic somehow coalesced. Bergman began his career as a writer for the theater and for other film makers. He wrote the scripts of virtually all his own films. Bergman was married five times, divorced four times and widowed once. One of his nine children, Daniel, has followed his footsteps as a film maker. After Bergman's divorce from Daniel's mother, concert pianist Kabi Laretei, he was involved with Swedish actress Liv Ullmann. In October 2006 he underwent hip surgery. He never quite recovered and died on July 30, 2007 at his home on an island off the coast of Sweden. He had turned 89 two weeks prior to his death. Link to Wikipedia biography