The serial egotist — At age 80 he still can’t stop writing about himself

He is one of the rare directors who, through most ofhis career, has had total artistic control over his own work. Three of his films have won Oscars — The Virgin Spring, Through A Glass Darkly and Fanny And Alexander — and he has been honoured by Cannes and Berlin. The most shattering experience of Bergman’s life was his battle with the Swedish tax authorities. On January 30, 1976, tax police raided his theatre in the middle of a rehearsal of Strindberg’s Dance Of Death, arrested Bergman and booked him like a common criminal.

He describes the catastrophic effect of this event: "It was an attack on my existence. I was hit by a reality I couldn’t manoeuvre and I couldn’t manipulate and I couldn’t master. Existence became unbearable". He put himself in the hands of a psychiatrist. "I wanted nothing better than to jump off the balcony. But I thought that was a poor solution. So I agreed to be locked up. I walked in the corridors and chatted with the other nutcases." Bergman spent only three weeks in the asylum. He was saved by his ownaggression. "When the tax authorities didn’t find anything, they started to push with new manipulations and with blackmail," he says. "I became so devilishly furious that in some way my rage came to help me."

Speaking of his early life, he says: "My exercise of my profession has never been bohemian. I lived extremely simply. I had some flat or there was supposed to be some kind of home. But I wasn’t specially interested in fitting it out. I don’t remember much about my private life, if I’m to be perfectly honest. I can’t remember when my children were born. I don’t know how old they are. If I want to date something, I do it with reference to films or plays. Yes, that was the Summer I made Smiles Of A Summer Night. Then I know it was 1955."

Bergman comes across as an artist ferociously dedicated to his craft, fashioning some of the most memorable films in the history of cinema from a range of fierce personal experiences. "My life round about this profession was, you might say, tumultuous," headmits. Tumultuous would indeed be the word for his life from 1943 when he married dancer and choreographer Else Fisher, until his fourth marriage to Ingrid von Rosen in 1971. Three years after his marriage to Fisher, he met Ellen Lundstrom whom he married in 1945. They had three children, but it was a bitter relationship — "fighting, chained together and drowning". He has written of himself in those days in harsh terms: "I trusted no one, loved no one. I missed no one."

In 1949, he was off again to Paris with Gun Hagberg, a screen journalist he met on the set of To Joy. The film was really about Ellen and himself, "about the conditions imposed by art, about fidelity and infidelity". Three years later, he started his relationship with another Andersson, Bibi, (who starred in Wild Strawberries). But he left her in 1959 — the year he made the Oscar-winning Virgin Spring — to marry Kabi Laretei, an Estonian pianist of international reputation, friend of Stravinsky and Bartok. In 1965,he left Laretei to begin one of his most lasting relationships, with Liv Ullmann. They never married, but they had a daughter.

"Deep down, I am faithful," he says. In one sense, it is true: he has maintained strong friendships with most of his women, notable Bibi Andersson and Ullmann. Matrimonially, however, this was not proven until, while making Cries And Whispers (1971), he met and married, Ingrid von Rosen, a 41-year-old married countess with four children. After the tax scandal, they left Sweden and spent eight years in exile, mostly in Munich.

— The Observer News Service