Swedish film icon Ingmar Bergman dies at 89

STOCKHOLM, July 30 (Reuters) Legendary Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman, who influenced a generation of film-makers with his often stark works on themes of mortality and sexual torment, died today at the age of 89.

Bergman's daughter Eva Bergman, quoted by Swedish news agency TT, said the self-taught film-maker and scriptwriter died peacefully in his home on Faro Island in the Baltic Sea.

Bergman was famed for films such as ''Wild Strawberries'', ''Scenes From a Marriage'' and ''Fanny and Alexander'' -- a classic that scooped four Oscars -- which gave Sweden a reputation for melancholy but mad him an acknowleged master of modern cinema.

His work, in all, encompassed 54 films, 126 theatre productions and 39 radio plays.

His cinematic masterpieces often dwelt on sexual confusion, loneliness and the vain search for the meaning of life -- themes that many ascribed to a traumatic childhood in which he was beaten by his father.

''He was one of the great ones,'' said Jorn Donner, who produced ''Fanny and Alexander'', in a telephone interview.

''I knew him for more than 50 years.'' Offstage, Bergman's private life often thrust him into the limelight. He was married five times to beautiful and gifted women and had liaisons with his leading actresses.

Bergman told Reuters in a rare interview in 2001 that personal demons tormented and inspired him throughout his life.

''The demons are innumerable, appear at the most inconvenient times and create panic and terror,'' he said at the time. ''But I have learnt that if I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my advantage.'' Sickly as a child, the young Bergman was humiliated by his father, a Lutheran priest, who frequently caned him.

He gained international recognition with the 1956 film ''The Seventh Seal'', set in the Middle Ages, in which a crusader searching for God and the meaning of life plays chess with death. It won the jury prize at the 1957 Cannes film festival.

He won Academy Awards for best foreign language film in 1960, 1961 and 1983, and a collection of his work was last month added to the UNESCO store of history's greatest archives.

The director's self-proclaimed retirement from big screen productions followed the making of ''Fanny and Alexander''.

Produced in three- and five-hour versions, the film won four Oscars in 1983, including best foreign film.

He subsequently directed a number of television productions, including the celebrated ''Saraband'' in 2003.

Bergman settled on Faro -- or ''sheep'' -- island off the southeast coast of Sweden after shooting seven movies there.

Each summer the island hosts a celebration of his life and movies.

REUTERS PD BST1640