This melancholy Swede whose life ended with a great triumph, was probably a low-grade clinical depressive for long periods of his life, and perhaps worked as hard as he did to keep depression at bay.

"I was very cruel to actors and to other people," he said when he was in his 60s. "I was a very, very unpleasant young man. If I met the young Ingmar today, I think I would say, 'You are very talented and I will see if I can help you, but I don't think I want anything else to do with you.' I don't say I'm pleasant now, but I think I changed slowly in my 50s. At least I hope I've changed."

Liv Ullmann, who lived with him for five years and had a child by him, tells this story: "We always had breakfast together, And, as we ate, Ingmar would relate all the nightmares he had experienced during the previous night. And I listened in horror. Because I knew that I would be acting them out as he filmed, later that day."

The world knows Ingmar Bergman for his films, but in his native Sweden he was an almost overbearing cultural figure. Besides his filmmaking, he was the country's top theater director, he wrote and directed radio plays, he did a lot of work for television, he made soap commercials, he wrote novels and two memoirs. Half the country watched his film of the Mozart opera The Magic Flute on TV. His TV series Scenes from a Marriage embroiled the whole nation in a continuing debate on marriage. When he died, Sweden stopped. TV was interrupted to show his work, flags were hung half-mast, and the whole country mourned the passing of the world’s most famous Swede.

4. A MASTER CRAFTSMAN

Bergman made his films beautifully. He called them "handmade." His budgets were all under well under half a million dollars. Technically, as a craftsman, he has no peer. The camera simply exists where he put it. It moves like the gaze of an ur-observer. It frames like a Matisse or a Hopper. It sees the light like Rembrandt. He never saw a reason to hurry the viewer along, like Hollywood story-telling does, scared by its own vacuity. In fact, he was more interested in nailing the viewer from image to beautiful image. What he achieved in his cinematography and montage, in the pacing and flow of his images, in his magisterial control, is beyond compare. Nobody touches him. Technically, put next to Bergman, a much-touted technophile like Steven Spielberg is a loud, crass, obvious, and unsubtle boor.

A set routine and a set crew brought Bergman to his technical mastery. He worked like Fassbinder, flitting between stage and screen with the same repertory company. "We've already discussed the new film the year before," Sven Nykvist, his second great cinematographer after Gunnar Fischer (The Seventh Seal), told critic Roger Ebert in 1975. "Then Ingmar goes to his island and writes the screenplay. The next year, we shoot — usually about the 15th of April. Usually we are the same 18 people working with him, year after year, one film a year." Among the 18, there was the important job of the "hostess," she who served coffee and pastries and made the set a haven of domesticity. "How large a crew do you use?" David Lean asked Bergman one year at Cannes. "I always work with 18 friends," Bergman replied "That's funny," said Lean. "I work with 150 enemies."