During the run of The Constant Wife in London, Bergman discovered a hard lump under her left breast. The lump was removed on 15 June 1974 in a London clinic. While working on Autumn Sonata, Bergman discovered another lump, and flew back to London for another surgery. Afterward, she began rehearsals for Waters of the Moon (1978).
Despite her illness, she agreed to play Golda Meir in 1981, then retired to her apartment in Cheyne Gardens, London, where she underwent chemotherapy. As photographers camped outside on the pavement, she refrained from approaching the front window. The cancer had spread to her spine, collapsing her twelfth vertebra; her right lung no longer functioned, and only a small part of her left lung had not collapsed.
Bergman died in London on 29 August 1982, at midnight on her 67th birthday. Her ex-husband Lars Schmidt and three other people were present, having drunk their last toast to her hours earlier. A copy of The Little Prince was at her bedside, opened to a page near the end. The memorial service was held in St Martin-in-the-Fields church in October with 1,200 mourners. In attendance were her children, the Rossellinis, and relatives from Sweden, as well as numerous fellow actors and costars, including Liv Ullmann, Sir John Gielgud, Dame Wendy Hiller, Birgit Nilsson and Joss Ackland. As part of the service, quotations from Shakespeare were read. Musical selections included “This Old Man” from The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, a piece by Beethoven, and strains of “As Time Goes By”. Bergman’s grandson, Justin Daly, recalled the event as hundreds of photographers were waiting and taking pictures, and a camera hit him on the head: “In the middle of all this chaos, I could sense that she wasn’t just my grandmother. She belonged to everyone else. She belonged to the world.”