Ingmar Bergman, the dark arthouse director considered by many fans to have been the greatest film-maker ever, has died at the age of 89.

Bergman died early this morning at his home on the tiny Baltic island of Faaro, near Gotland. No cause of death was immediately given, but his daughter, Eva, said that he had passed away "peacefully".

Bergman made about 60 movies before retiring from film-making in 2003, including The Seventh Seal (1957), Winter Light (1963) and Fanny and Alexander (1982), which won four Oscars, including for Best Foreign Language Film.

In his films, Bergman’s vision was said to encompass 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.

Bergman approached difficult subjects such as plague and madness with inventive technique and carefully honed writing, and became one of the towering figures of serious film-making. For many movie buffs, he was the greatest of the authorial film-makers of the 1950s and 1960s, outranking even such figures as Federico Fellini, Luis Bunuel or Jean-Luc Godard.

One of his most devoted fans, the American director Woody Allen, said in a 70th birthday tribute in 1988 that he was "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera".

Marcus Oscarsson, Times Correspondent in Stockholm, said that the entire country "kind of stopped for a minute". Normal television programming was interrupted and flags were quickly lowered to half-mast on many public buildings around Sweden.

"His pieces are immortal," said Fredrik Reinfeldt, the Prime Minister. "Ingmar Bergman was one of the greatest dramatists in the world – for many he was the absolute greatest."

Bergman first gained international attention with 1955’s Smiles of a Summer Night, a romantic comedy that inspired the Stephen Sondheim musical A Little Night Music - although he had made his first film ten years earlier.

But it was The Seventh Seal, released two years later, that riveted critics and audiences and marked him out as a cinema great. An allegorical tale of the medieval Black Plague years, it contains one of cinema’s most famous scenes - a knight playing chess with the shrouded figure of Death.

"I was terribly scared of death," Bergman said of his state of mind when making the 1957 film, which was nominated for an Academy Award in the best picture category. The film was acclaimed for distilling the essence of Bergman’s work - high seriousness, flashes of unexpected humor and striking images.

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