Swedish film icon Ingmar Bergman dies at 89

By Anna Ringstrom and Sarah Edmonds

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Sweden's Ingmar Bergman, who influenced a generation of film-makers with his often stark works about mortality and sexual torment, died on Monday aged 89.

The self-taught director and scriptwriter died in the morning at his home on Faro Island in the Baltic Sea, said Cissi Elwin, chief executive of the Swedish Film Institute.

Sweden and the global film community lamented the death of an icon.

"He was one of the great ones," Jorn Donner, producer of "Fanny and Alexander", Bergman's last work for the big screen which won four Oscars, told Reuters.

Elwin said Bergman, in a wheelchair and seeming very tired, had appeared briefly this month at an annual celebration of his career on Faro Island.

"It's a very big loss today," she said. "It's very, very strange and very unreal because Ingmar Bergman is so much (a part of) Swedish film."

Bergman was famed for films such as "Wild Strawberries", "Scenes From a Marriage" and "Fanny and Alexander", which gave Sweden a reputation for melancholy and made him an acknowledged master of modern cinema.

He made 54 films, 126 theatre productions and 39 radio plays. His cinematic masterpieces often dwelt on sexual confusion, loneliness and the vain search for the meaning of life -- themes he ascribed to a traumatic childhood in which he was beaten by his father, a Lutheran minister.

He told Reuters in a rare interview in 2001 that personal demons tormented and inspired him throughout his life.

"The demons are innumerable, appear at the most inconvenient times and create panic and terror," he said at the time. "But I have learnt that if I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my advantage."

The heavily autobiographical "Fanny and Alexander" tells the story of an upper-class family in the city of Uppsala before World War One.

The boy protagonist Alexander and his sister Fanny are mentally and physically abused by their stepfather -- a bishop modeled on Bergman's father. Alexander at last uses supernatural powers to take a sinister revenge.

HOMAGE

Bergman gained international recognition with "The Seventh Seal", a 1956 film in which a Crusader searching for God plays chess with a personified Death. Film directors all over the world have named him as an inspiration.

Woody Allen idolized him, paying homage to "The Seventh Seal" in his early comedy "Love and Death".