For 30 years and more, Ingmar Bergman, the dominant Swedish artist in cinema and theatre, brought to his work an intensely personal vision, shot through with pain and pessimism and charting the breakdown of human relationships with a piercing insight.

Such was the force of his convictions and his technical skill, that his films came almost to be regarded as synonymous with Swedish life and character, though in working out private obsessions through a public medium he never lost the individuality with which a great artist transcends time and place. Inevitably drawing on the culture and mores of his country, he did so with a sensibility uniquely his.

When his films first became widely known outside Sweden during the 1950s their impact was sensational. He was acclaimed as one of the finest artists the cinema had yet produced and he was even written about as a latter-day Shakespeare. This extreme of adulation gave way in time to a more measured assessment and his harping on gloom and despair came to be seem more like a mannerism than a genuine creative urge. But his reputation revived and when, in 1983, he announced his farewell to the cinema, his place among the supreme film artists of his own and, indeed, any era, was secure. From Smiles of a Summer Night to Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring, Persona and Fanny and Alexander, he produced a body of work of enduring power and insight.

Parallel with his film-making went an equally distinguished career in the theatre, where he directed a wide repertoire of classical and contemporary plays. His productions were notable for their dramatic tautness, powerful use of lighting and fine performances.

Bergman was born in Uppsala, the son of a pastor who became chaplain to the Royal Court of Sweden. His strict upbringing made for a lonely and unhappy childhood and was a lasting influence, inducing a feeling of guilt that was seldom far from his films. He later said that his whole life had been a conflict between pleasure and fear.

He studied art, history and literature at Stockholm University and became interested in the theatre, acting in and directing student productions. He went on to become a trainee director in the professional theatre and was responsible for a spectacular production of Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata. By the age of 25 he was running a theatre company.

In 1944 he met Carl Anders Dymling, the head of Svenskfilmindustri, who persuaded him to think seriously about the cinema and commissioned an original screenplay. This was Frenzy, directed by Alf Sjöberg, the leading Swedish director of the day, and was the first Swedish film since silent days to be shown around the world.

In the following year Bergman had his debut as a director with Crisis and he made further films while continuing to write original screenplays for other directors. This first period of his work was preoccupied with youthful angst, with many suicides or attempted suicides, unwanted pregnancies and encounters with mysterious, fatal women.

The most personal of his early films was Prison (1949), a complex story of a film director who contemplates making a film about the Devil and meanwhile has a series of experiences which blackly demonstrate that the Devil rules.

At this time Bergman was also busy in the theatre staging a succession of plays, including three of his own, at the Municipal Theatre, Gothenburg, and establishing the pattern of simultaneous film and theatre work. He was also building up a stock company of actors with whom he worked on stage and screen over many years. With the success of his films, names such as Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann became internationally known.

The best known film of Bergman’s second period, in which youth is replaced by marriage as the central subject, is Summer Interlude, in which a light-hearted but finally tragic youthful affair is seen in the context of how it affected the survivor in later life. By the early 1950s, Bergman’s cinematic style, at first fairly sober and conventional, was becoming more adventurous and baroque, whether in the tense, fatalistic drama of Sawdust and Tinsel, or the disturbing farce of A Lesson in Love.

But it was seen most of all in the films that made him a leading figure in international cinema, the glittering and elegant period comedy, Smiles of a Summer Night, later the basis for the Stephen Sondheim musical, A Little Night Music, and The Seventh Seal. The latter, an allegorical morality play set during a medieval plague of the Black Death contains one of cinema’s most celebrated scenes, in which a wandering knight plays chess with the shrouded figure of Death.