Ingmar Bergman swapped his tin soldiers for a magic lantern at nine
As a boy in Uppsala, Ingmar Bergman gave away a set of toy soldiers to get a magic lantern, then staged Strindberg with puppets, voicing every role himself. That child became the Swedish director behind The Seventh Seal and Persona, and one of the most admired filmmakers cinema has produced.
Bergman was born on 14 July 1918, the son of a nurse, Karin, and a Lutheran minister, Erik, who later served as chaplain to the Swedish king. Home was strict: for small offences such as wetting himself, the boy was shut inside dark closets. Church services bored him, but the buildings did not. He later described losing himself in low arches, painted saints, dragons and devils while his father preached. He said his faith was gone by the age of eight, a loss he only settled with while shooting Winter Light in 1962.
His teenage years held an uncomfortable episode. In 1934, at 16, he spent a summer with a German family, attended a Nazi rally in Weimar and saw Hitler in person. In his memoir Laterna Magica he admitted that for years he had cheered the dictator on, and that the opening of the concentration camps hit him as a brutal shock that stripped away his innocence.
At Stockholm University College, where he enrolled in 1937, he spent more time in student theatre and cinemas than in lectures, and never graduated. A quarrel over a romance led to a physical fight with his father and a long estrangement. In 1942 he directed his own script, Caspar's Death; people from Svensk Filmindustri saw it and hired him to work on screenplays.
What followed was prodigious. Bergman directed more than 60 films and documentaries, writing most of them, and staged over 170 plays, leading both Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theatre and Munich's Residenztheater. From 1961 many of his films were shot on the island of Fårö, often with cinematographer Sven Nykvist and actors such as Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow. Sight and Sound ranked him eighth among directors in 2002, and four of his films, Persona and Fanny and Alexander among them, appeared in its 2012 list of the greatest films. He died on 30 July 2007.
Source: Ingmar Bergman
