He took a job as an apprentice director at a Stockholm theater and in 1941 joined the Swedish film industry as a script doctor. Three years later his first script, Torment, written with the film’s director Alf Sjoberg, became a hit in Sweden. Accordingly, he got his first directing assignment on Crisis. There followed a run of journeyman stuff. In 1949, he produced his first characteristic excellent work, The Devil's Wanton, about a prostitute's suicide, in which his metaphysical, psychological and moral interests came to the fore. Three films about women — Three Strange Loves, Summer with Monika, Sawdust and Tinsel –- cemented his reputation in Sweden in the '50s. Then Smiles of a Summer Night won critical acclaim at Cannes and made real money in Europe, and Bergman was free to make anything he wanted. He rose to the challenge with two masterpieces. The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries made Bergman an immediate international arthouse staple, and he entered a golden period in the '60s and '70s, that included the Oscar-winning The Virgin Spring and his Absence-of-God trilogy Through A Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence.

In 1976, his golden age came to a bizarre stop. Bergman was arrested during a rehearsal of his artistic forebear Strindberg’s The Dance of Death at the Royal Dramatic Theater, bundled off in handcuffs, and charged with income tax fraud. He went into a long pout and exiled himself from Sweden for eight years. Eventually the Swedish government dropped the charges and apologized profusely, hoping to lure him back. He had some sour revenge: hundreds of people lost their jobs because he wasn’t around anymore, and the Swedish film industry lost millions in potential income.

Abroad, he tried various things. He visited Hollywood and other filmmaking centers, he made his first film in English, the flop The Serpent's Egg. He made a movie with his namesake (no relation) Ingrid Bergman, the very good Autumn Sonata. He directed plays, basing himself in Munich. He finally returned to Sweden when he was 60, more or less washed up.

In 1983, he made a comeback film that became his greatest international success – a rather gentler-than-usual-for-Bergman autobiographical family movie, Fanny and Alexander. It got six Oscar nominations (two for best director and original screenwriter) and won four Oscars – the biggest Oscar haul by a foreign film ever.

"Making 'Fanny and Alexander' was such joy that I thought that feeling will never come back,'' he told NY Times critic Michiko Kakutani when she visited him at his island home on Faro. ''I will try to explain: When I was at university many years ago, we were all in love with this extremely beautiful girl. She said no to all of us, and we didn't understand. She had had a love affair with a prince from Egypt and, for her, everything after this love affair had to be a failure. So she rejected all our proposals. I would like to say the same thing. The time with 'Fanny and Alexander' was so wonderful that I decided it was time to stop. I have had my prince of Egypt. To make another picture and have it feel gray and heavy and difficult with lots of problems - that would be very sad. And I have seen many of my colleagues get older and older and more and more dusty until suddenly they are thrown out, and they cannot get money for their next picture and must go around with their hats in their hands. That is something I do not want - better to stop now when everything is perfect.''