Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman dead

Sweden: Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman, widely regarded as one of the great masters of modern cinema, died Monday, local media reported. He was 89.

Bergman died at his home on the small Baltic islet of Faro, north of the tourist island of Gotland, Sweden, the Swedish news agency TT said, citing his daughter Eva Bergman, one of his nine children. He died a peaceful death, she told TT. A cause of death was not immediately available.

Bergman, whose 1982 film "Fanny and Alexander" won an Oscar for best foreign film, made about 60 movies before retiring from film making in 2003.

In his films, Bergman's vision encompassed all the extremes of his beloved Sweden: the claustrophobic gloom of unending winter nights, the gentle merriment of glowing summer evenings and the bleak magnificence of the island where he spent his last years.

"He was one of the great masters and one of the great humanists of cinema. There are very few people of that kind of stature today.

He proved that cinema could be an art form," said Nick James, editor of Sight & Sound, the magazine of the British Film Institute. Though best known internationally for his films, Bergman was also a prominent stage director.

He worked at several playhouses in Sweden from the mid-1940s, including the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm which he headed from 1963 to 1966. He staged many plays by the Swedish author August Strindberg, whom he cited as an inspiration.

Bergman remained active later in life with stage productions and occasional TV shows. He said he still felt a need to direct, although he had no plans to make another feature film.

The son of a Lutheran clergyman and a housewife, Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala on July 14, 1918, and grew up with a brother and sister in a household of severe discipline that he described in painful detail in the autobiography "The Magic Lantern."

Young Ingmar found his love for drama production early in life. The director said he had coped with the authoritarian environment of his childhood by living in a world of fantasies. When he first saw a movie he was greatly moved.

"Sixty years have passed, nothing has changed, it's still the same fever," he wrote of his passion for film in the 1987 autobiography.

STOCKHOLM, Monday, AP