Woody Allen described him as “the greatest film artist since the invention of the motion picture camera”. Steven Spielberg said that “his love for the cinema almost gives me a guilty conscience”, and Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa queued up to work with him.

Ingmar Bergman, who died yesterday at the age of 89, did not need his three Oscars for Best Foreign Film and numerous other awards to prove his stature as a film director. Over five decades behind the camera he made more than 50 films ranging from frothy sex comedies to harrowingly austere character studies. They established his reputation as one of the giants of the medium, albeit one whose appeal was concentrated in the arthouse rather than the multiplex.

In his native Sweden he was equally celebrated for his theatre direction and television work, notably Scenes from a Marriage, which chronicled the collapse of a relationship in excruciating detail and fuelled a national debate about divorce, and The Magic Flute, a comical interpretation of Mozart’s opera that enchanted a generation of Swedish children.

Bergman’s daughter Eva, one of his nine children, said that her father died early yesterday morning at his home on Faro, the bleak Baltic island with a population of 600 where he shot several of his finest films.

The cause of death was not immediately clear but he had become a virtual recluse since undergoing a hip replacement in October and last month failed to make an appearance during Bergman Week, the annual festival of his work held on the island.

Tributes poured in from across the film world. Gilles Jacob, the director of the Cannes Film Festival, called Bergman the “last of the greats, because he proved that cinema can be as profound as literature. He was a director of the human condition, of the misery of man, of feminine mystery.”

Lord Attenborough, the president of Bafta, who began his own directing career more than 20 years after Bergman, said: “The world has lost one of its very greatest film-makers.”

In Sweden flags were lowered to half-mast and national television pulled programmes from the schedules to air documentaries about Bergman and several of his most famous films, including Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal.

Fredrik Reinfeldt, the Swedish Prime Minister, said: “His pieces are immortal. Ingmar Bergman was one of the greatest dramatists in the world – for many he was the absolute greatest. I think it is difficult to understand his enormous contribution to the Swedish film industry and drama in Sweden and abroad.”

Bergman’s standing in his home country was not always so high: 28 years ago he was driven into a nine-year exile in Germany after an investigation by the Swedish tax authorities caused him to have a mental breakdown and spend a month in hospital.

Bergman was born in 1918, the son of a disciplinarian Lutheran chaplain and a housewife. Fascinated with films from an early age, he trained as an actor and director at the University of Stockholm. He made his debut as a director with Crisis in 1946, broke through internationally with Summer Interlude in 1951 and sealed his position in the pantheon with The Seventh Seal in 1957.

He retired in 2003 after making the television drama Saraband, which extended the story of the main characters from Scenes from a Marriage and was watched by one in nine Swedes.

Bergman was married five times and was known for his volcanic tantrums, but also cultivated a calm working atmosphere and stuck rigorously to routines, always writing for exactly three hours every morning in identical yellow notebooks.

Despite his apparent pre-occupation with difficult subject matter such as madness, plague, death and the existence of God, he did not always take himself as seriously as his image suggests. When a Swedish film magazine published an “anti-Bergman” issue in the 1960s, one of the most savage contributors was Bergman himself, writing under a pseudonym.

Don’t miss and don’t bother . . .

Three hits

Wild Strawberries (1957)
Terrific meditation on life by an elderly professor who embarks with his family on a long road trip to pick up his last big academic award. Bittersweet memories of youth are beautifully stitched into this fractious and melancholic journey

The Seventh Seal (1957)
A satire about religious extremists and faith set against the brutal Middle Ages in which a young Knight fresh home from the Crusades plays chess with the spectre of Death. Bergman at his most powerful and bleakest

Fanny and Alexander (1982)
An epic family saga with whiffs of autobiography. The festive adventures and puritanical fears are seen through the eyes of a small boy. Bergman illuminates that elusive area between art and artifice

Three misses

A Ship Bound for India (1947)
Schematic melodrama about a half-blind tugboat captain alienated by his family and tortured by dreams of escape

The Virgin Spring (1959)
A cruel but plodding allegory about rape and pillage in 14th-century Sweden. It reeked of “this is good for you” worthiness

The Silence (1963)
Wrist-slittingly depressing study of loneliness and obsession. Two febrile sisters book into an hotel whose only other guests are dwarf entertainers. An allegory about sex and death that is stretched beyond snapping point

— James Christopher

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