They also knew how to make the television shows he liked. Bergman was a fan of the Muppets, particularly the out-of-control drummer, Animal, and rarely missed an episode of Sex and the City. “The women are beautiful, and they talk dirty,” he told Linn. “Do you talk that way with your girlfriends?”
The ways of women, of course, fascinated Bergman, who in more than 50 films probed the female psyche to a degree matched by few of his peers. He often used Liv as an alter ego, and his mother, notes Linn, “is a character in nearly all his films.” Despite having left many of his wives and mistresses for new loves, he was “fantastic at keeping up a good relationship” after the romance ended, says Laretei, a concert pianist who inspired the character played by actress Ingrid Bergman (no relation) in Autumn Sonata (1978). “The great charm he had was that he was really, truly interested in you when you talked to him.”
For his 70th birthday Bergman invited several of his exes to Fårö; his guest list included Liv, Laretei and former leading lady Bibi Andersson. According to Linn, who was there, “These are women who know how to go out onstage and be fabulous. And they are fabulous. There was no bad acting. My father hated bad acting.”
Their collaborations with Bergman connected them. “He liked to surround himself with very strong women,” she adds. “Yes, he was a genius, but he couldn’t have done it without the women. He was their muse, but they were his, too.”
After Ingrid died, Bergman began making regular visits to Fårö’s church. (A black X over the year 1995 marks her passing on his workroom door.) The son of a strict Lutheran minister, he was a self-professed agnostic who had long grappled with his doubt onscreen. But he wanted to believe he would see Ingrid again and, at Hammars, added the monastic, wood-paneled “Ingrid Room,” furnished with a simple cot, where he would watch the sunrise. On Saturdays he would go to church to listen to the bells. One evening, however, the bell ringer failed to show on time. Furious after waiting five minutes, Bergman charged up the steep belfry to ring the bells himself and then chewed out the minister for the lapse. When the church was later scouting for the vicar’s replacement, the departing one advised his employers to write in the ad, “New minister needed. Ingmar Bergman will be the bell ringer.”
Without Ingrid to anchor him, “work became his savior,” notes Ingrid Dahlberg, a longtime colleague who runs the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, created by the director in 2002 to house his personal archives, including his manuscripts. He penned two screenplays, both directed by Liv Ullmann: Private Confessions (1996), about his parents’ troubled marriage, and Faithless (2000), about the devastating effects of an affair, drawn from his own life and shot in part on Fårö. He also returned to directing after a 20-year absence, reuniting Liv and his best friend, Erland Josephson, in the austere Saraband (2003). The pair reprised the roles they played in Scenes From a Marriage. The sequel picks up on the divorced couple 30 years later, when the wife, Marianne, visits her former husband, Johan, at his summer home to see what has come of his life. Bergman hung the Saraband poster, showing the two stars, across from his bed.
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