Ingmar Bergman 1918-2007

Ingmar Bergman had a strict upbringing, courtesy of his father - a Lutheran minister. As a child he would find himself locked in a small dark cupboard as a punishment for wetting the bed. Photograph: Bonniers Hylen/AFP

Summer With Monika (1952) was one of the great early Bergmans; a clear-eyed, unsentimental elegy to young love that made a star of Harriet Anderson. At the time some viewers found it hard to see beyond the daring splashes of on-screen nudity. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Dappled with the ghosts of A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1955's Smiles of a Summer Night is surely Bergman's warmest, most purely enjoyable motion picture. A witty La Ronde of romantic misadventures, the film was the director's first international hit. Photograph: Kobal

If 1957's The Seventh Seal remains the director's most iconic picture, its opening "Chess-with-Death" scene still stands as the archetypal Bergman moment. The film has since been parodied by everyone from Roger Corman and Woody Allen to Arnold Schwarzenegger and French and Saunders. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

The Seventh Seal went on to win Bergman the top prize at Cannes and establish him as arguably the most vital and distinctive talent in world cinema. Photograph: BBC

Shot in the same year as The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries could hardly have been more different. This gentle, compassionate odyssey through Sweden starred silent-screen legend Victor Sjostrom as an aged professor making peace with his past. Photograph: Public domain

Beautifully crafted and delicately harrowing, 1972's Cries and Whispers starred Harriet Andersson as the dying owner of a country house, and Liv Ullmann as her sister. The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, with Sven Nykvist winning a deserved Oscar for his cinematography. Photograph: Kobal

Originally conceived as a six-part TV mini-series, Scenes From a Marriage (1973) offers an unflinching portrait of marital discord. Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson cover themselves with glory in a claustrophobic acting masterclass. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Bergman won an Oscar for his last great film; the picture he conceived as his grand farewell to cinema. Fanny and Alexander (1982) is a semi-autobiographical family saga that plays out in a world of flamboyant actors, wicked stepfathers and unstable magicians. Inevitably, it's hard not to view the stubborn, over-imaginative Alexander as the director's surrogate. Photograph: Swedish Film Institute

Like Sinatra, Bergman staged a number of comebacks. In 2003 he made Saraband, starring Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson. It was greeted with glowing reviews on its 2005 release in the UK. Photograph: Public domain

The success of Saraband failed, however, to draw the now fiercely private Bergman back into public life. In later years he lived as a semi-recluse on the Swedish island of Faro. He confessed that he rarely revisited the great works of his career because he found them "too depressing". Photograph: Public domain