When Linn, her daughter by Bergman, was born while they were filming The Hour of the Wolf, Lutheran pastors refused to baptise her. "I was a scandal because I wasn't married to Ingmar, " she told Ciaran Carty in 1997. "It was terrible." Bergman got the idea for Persona from a Polaroid of Ullman with her actress friend Bibi Anderson.

"We looked so alike that he thought of us as merging into one woman. He wrote the script in a few days and we were in production on Faro island just a few weeks later."

Faro, where he died on Monday, was a home he bought for Ullmann and where they lived "for five incredible years. But you know I wouldn't have done it again."

Bergman was someone to live near but not with. He led a very solitary life. Ulmann recalled how he spoke regularly on the phone to just three people. He never went out, never went to parties. "Friendship is give and take but Ingmar has different rules, " she said at the time. "I think we admire him so much, it is according to his rules that we are friends. I couldn't have any other friend that is as possessive and controlling as he is. I do it with him because he is a genius and I love him so much and he is the father of my child."

Erland Josephson, who knew Bergman for nearly 60 years and played characters representing facets of him, never wanted to visit Faro. "Years ago I went but I don't do it any more, " he told Ciaran Carty in 1998.

"We have very long telephone calls. Ingmar is a phenomenon in telephone speaking."

Bergman once said he was his own subject: "I am forever living in my child."

The characters that recur in Wild Strawberries, Smiles On A Summer's Night, Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander are drawn from his relatives. To prepare actors for a part he would talk a lot about his relatives and parents. "He likes to talk about them and it's good inspiration for actors, " said Josephson. "Most of his characters existed. Yet you feel very free when you act them. It's not giving a portrait, it's giving an experience." Often accused of lacking humour, Bergman still created memorable comedies. "He goes up and down like everyone else, " said Josephson.

"I'm almost as old as he is so I know that it's depressing when the body starts to humiliate you. . . The death is eating you all the time. As long as he can be creative I think he'll never be deeply depressed."

Woody Allen: "He was probably the greatest film artist. . . since the invention of the motion-picture camera. I was very saddened. He was a friend and certainly the greatest film artist of my lifetime. He told me he was afraid that he would die on a very, very sunny day and I can only hope it was overcast and he got the weather he wanted."

Michael Apted (head of Directors' Guild of America): "Bergman was the epitome of a director's director . . . creating beautiful, complex and smart films that imprinted permanently into the psyche."

Gilles Jacob (president of Cannes Film Festival): "Modern cinema has lost one of its last pioneers, a pioneer of genius."

Richard Linklater ('Fast Food Nation'): "For an artist who contemplated what he called 'the great mystery' probably more than any other, it's almost comforting to know he's now experienced it. . . or not experienced it, as he seemed to think quite possible."

Richard Attenborough: "The world has lost one of its very greatest filmmakers. He taught us all so much throughout his life."

Michael Winner: "He was the god of original cinema, of thoughtful cinema, of creative cinema, and he was an enormous influence on my life."

Irish Film Institute: "[He was] renowned for his reputation as one of cinema's most spiritual and questioning voices."