Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish auteur whose visionary work in early masterpieces such as "The Seventh Seal" and "Wild Strawberries" and later films such as "Persona" and "Cries and Whispers" probed the depths of the human psyche with existential dramas that redefined cinema, died Monday. He was 89.
The reclusive Academy Award-winning director and writer died at his home on the Baltic island of Faro off the coast of Sweden. Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, confirmed his death on the foundation's website. Bergman had never fully recovered from hip surgery in October, Swedish news media reported.
Bergman was considered one of the greatest directors in motion picture history. His movies are credited with helping open America's doors to foreign films in the 1950s.
He won Oscars three times for best foreign-language film -- for "The Virgin Spring" (1960), "Through a Glass Darkly" (1961) and "Fanny and Alexander" (1983) -- and received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Irving J. Thalberg Award in 1970 for his body of work.
"Bergman was the epitome of a director's director -- creating beautiful, complex and smart films that imprinted permanently into the psyche -- inspiring filmmakers all over the world to create their own movies with similar passion and brio," Michael Apted, president of the Directors Guild of America, said in a statement.
Filmmaker Woody Allen, in a statement, called Bergman a friend. "He told me that he was afraid that he would die on a very, very sunny day, and I can only hope that it was overcast and he got the weather he wanted."
The reference acknowledged Bergman's reputation for gloomy and introspective films, which he had admitted to early in his career:
"I don't want to produce a work of art that the public can sit and suck aesthetically.... I want to give them a blow in the small of the back, to scorch their indifference, to startle them out of their complacency."
Critic Peter Rainer wrote for The Times in 2005 that "Bergman is undeniably one of the great directors, but he has always stood for more than the sum of his films. From the first, he was regarded ... as a visionary who grappled with the Big Questions of God and Man. His symbol-thick films were drenched in the night sweats of mortal torment. He was the kind of artist we had been brought up to believe was the real deal: He suffered for our souls."
