STOCKHOLM, Sweden, July 20 (UPI) -- Director Ingmar Bergman has decided to retire from the theater, the newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported Monday.
The newspaper quoted the 86-year-old Bergman as saying that after his staging of Ibsen's "Ghosts" at Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theater two years ago he came to the conclusion that "this must be it."
"I do not want them to carry me out of the theater," he said in a birthday interview. "Theater is the beginning and the end, while cinema belongs to the whoring and slaughterhouse trade. As for death, it has never been a stranger."
Bergman was better known internationally as a film writer-director, for which he won several Hollywood Academy Awards, although he always professed to love the stage more than the movies. His first job was as director of the Halsingborg municipal theater in 1944, and in 1945 he wrote and directed his first film, "Crisis." He later was director of the Malmo municipal theater but after 1959 was most closely identified with the Royal Dramatic Theater.
