Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman

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Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala (Sweden) on 14 July 1918. In 1937 he settled in Stockholm and the following year he began his apprenticeship as a theater director. In 1942, the Svensk Filmindustri proposes to work as a screenwriter. His first screenplay adapted to the cinema is Torment (1944) by Alf Sjöberg, who will get the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1946. After Summer Interlude (1951) and Women Waiting (1952), in 1953 the film-scandal Summer with Monika, with the debut actress Harriet Andersson, who will be one of his muses. The international success came in 1956 with his sixteenth film, Smiles of a Summer Night, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The film is successful all over the world and is the first to be distributed in Italy. In May 1957 also The seventh seal won the Special Jury Prize and is another great success. And the success was renewed in the same year by Wild Strawberries, Golden Bear at the Berlin festival of 1958. While continuing to direct important theatrical performances and collaborate with the radio, he also began a television activity that remains unknown outside of Sweden. Between 1961 and 1962 he won two Academy Awards, with The Virgin Spring (1959) and Through a Glass Darkly (1961). In 1965 a viral infection forced him to slow down his frenetic activity; he chose his house as his favorite residence on the island of Fårö, of which he fell in love since 1959. On the island he turns, among others, Persona (1966). He knows Liv Ullmann and begins a romantic relationship with her, from which he will separate, while maintaining an intense artistic activity with the actress. The film Scene from a marriage, broadcast in six episodes on Swedish television in 1974, is hugely popular. The same year, Cries and Whispers (1972) wins the Oscar for best foreign film. After an accusation of tax evasion he moved to Munich in 1976, where he directed The Serpent’s Egg. In 1977 he made his second film in Oslo, Autumn Sonata, outside Sweden. In 1979 he was finally acquitted of the charge of tax evasion but will return to Sweden only in 1982, the year in which he presents Fanny and Alexander. The film, which Bergman presents as his farewell from the cinema, is a great success all over the world, except in France, and gets four Academy Awards. He continued an intense theatrical activity, and in 1987 he published the autobiography The Magic Lantern, while in 1991 Images: My Life in Films, where he retraces and analyzes his own cinematographic work. After Fanny and Alexander, he makes eleven films exclusively for television, including After the Rehearsal(1984), The Blessed Ones (1986), In the Presence of a Clown (1997). In 2003 he directed the last television film, Saraband, where he took the scenes (and interpreters) of Scene from a marriage thirty years later. Criticism welcomes him with enthusiasm. In 2004 he also withdrew from theatrical scenes. He died on July 30th 2007 in his home at the island of Fårö.

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