Do we like them?

Do we like Ingmar Bergman?

Our score: 6 out of 10. A towering artist with a documented youthful Nazi sympathy that he turned away from, and a tangled private life; the record is real but thin on recent harm.

Ingmar Bergman is the Swedish director behind some of the most influential films ever made, and he spent his later years on the island of Fårö. He died in 2007, so there is no fresh scandal to chase. The 'why now' this year is mostly echoes of a row from last year about his past.

The big one is Hitler. In 1999 it was reported, from journalist Maria-Pia Boëthius's book, that Bergman said he had been enthralled by Hitler as a young man and changed his mind after seeing photos of the concentration camps. Far Out Magazine reports he recalled Hitler as 'unbelievably charismatic' at a rally when he was 16, and that his memoir ties that to his father's far-right views. This is Bergman's own account of his youth, and he did not dodge it.

In July 2025 actor Stellan Skarsgård went much harder at a festival in Karlovy Vary, saying Bergman was manipulative and 'a Nazi during the war'. The A.V. Club noted the claim rests on Skarsgård alone and isn't backed up in that piece. Liv Ullmann pushed back in January 2026, saying Bergman never stood for Nazi ideas, 'not then, and not now', while admitting she doesn't know what he said in his youth. Where you land depends on whether you weigh the teenage years or the five decades after.

On the harm check, nothing turned up in his adult words or acts: no campaigning against any group, no conspiracy slide, no company-keeping problem that we found. That is a gap in what we read rather than a clean bill from every angle, but it's why the youthful sympathy rates an asterisk rather than a fail. Faith, politics and apologies weren't the issue here; the point is that his conduct afterwards didn't repeat it.

The good-person side is more complicated. In 1976 police detained him in the middle of a rehearsal over alleged tax evasion; he was found innocent and the inquiries were dropped, but the press pile-on drove him to six years in Germany. Separately, Prospect describes him as a lover of several of his leading women, and notes some said he could freeze an actress out for years. No actress is quoted accusing him of anything in what we read, and Ullmann says the films weren't ordeals. It's a messy, not monstrous, picture.

The good stuff is the work itself: he wrote strong female roles that made stars of Ullmann, Bibi Andersson and Harriet Andersson, and Prospect argues they made him as much as he made them. We didn't find charity work or public service to set beside it, so that's honestly the whole list.