Max von Sydow
Celebrated veteran Swedish actor who found enduring fame as the priest in ‘The Exorcist’
MAX von Sydow, who died last Sunday aged 90, was the actor whose distinctive, ascetic features did more than anything to put the films of Ingmar Bergman on the international map.
He was an inspired choice to play the world-weary knight in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957). For Bergman, among other roles, he played a husband despairing of his wife’s schizophrenia in Through a Glass Darkly (1961), and a fisherman in fear of a nuclear holocaust in Winter Light (1963); in Shame and Hour of the Wolf (both 1968) he played artists suffering in worlds where faith, hope and certainty had gone Awol.
Von Sydow’s tortured face, bearing witness to long nights alone with a silent deity, seemed the very image of modern doubt and malaise.
Once, Bergman actually confronted the problem in The Magician (1958), where he cast von Sydow as a mesmerist apparently possessed of miraculous powers, but who may, or may not, be a sham.
Sporting a thick, black, biblical beard, this was Christ as near as make-up could imagine. Von Sydow’s ability to convince the audience that he resembled Jesus was never in doubt. Which is clearly why the Hollywood director George Stevens picked him to play the part of the Messiah in his 1965 film The Greatest Story Ever Told.
This was the role that for von Sydow opened the international flood gates. For 40 years thereafter he was never out of work and was first choice for key supporting roles (often as villains) by directors in the US and Europe.
Max Adolf von Sydow was born on April 10, 1929, in Lund, Sweden. He completed his national service in the army then enrolled at Stockholm’s theatre school, where previous students had included Greta Garbo and Bergman.
In 1951 von Sydow joined the Norrkoping-Linkoping Municipal Theatre before moving on to the Municipal Theatre in Halsingborg. From there von Sydow went on to Malmo.
The chief director at Malmo was Ingmar Bergman, who directed von Sydow in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Peer Gynt, Moliere’s Le Misanthrope and Goethe’s Faust. It was during this period that von Sydow first appeared in a Bergman film — The Seventh Seal.
As at the theatre in Malmo, actors were expected to alternate lead and supporting roles, so Bergman next cast him in bit parts in Wild Strawberries (1957) and Brink of Life (1958), before awarding him the quasi-Messianic lead in The Magician.
He followed this with one of the most powerful performances, playing the father of a girl raped and murdered in The Virgin Spring (1960).
His breakthrough came in 1965, when he was chosen to play Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told. This led to two more Hollywood pictures, Hawaii and The Quiller Memorandum (both 1966).
In the 1970s Max von Sydow starred in the film that seemed likely at the time to be his best remembered role: the priest assigned to fight the devil in The Exorcist (1973). It was a memorable cameo, which he reprised in the 1976 sequel.
After this he became less careful in his choice of pictures.
In 1984 he agreed to appear in David Lynch’s film of the science fiction fantasy Dune. It was one of a number of ill-advised excursions into science fiction made by the actor in the 1980s and 1990s.
The 1980 remake of Flash Gordon was by common consent the low point of his career, though Judge Dredd (1995) runs it close.
His forte was small but telling cameos and character roles.
Among these were his contributions to Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986); Awakenings (1990) and Snow Falling on Cedars (1999). He was nominated for an Oscar for his part in Pelle the Conqueror (1987).
In 2002 von Sydow had one of his biggest hits, alongside Tom Cruise in Minority Report, and two years later he played Eyvind in Curse of the Ring, a television adaptation of The Ring of the Nibelung.
In 2007, he starred in the hit Rush Hour 3, and the same year played the father of the stroke-damaged hero in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
His later film and television work included The Tudors (2009), and the following year Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Shutter Island and Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood. He appeared in The Simpsons in 2014, Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens in 2015 and three episodes of Game of Thrones in 2016.
The following year he was in Thomas Vinterberg’s Kursk, based on the story of the infamous submarine accident. His final role was in Echoes of the Past, about a Nazi massacre in Greece, which was in post-production when he died.
Max von Sydow married the actress Christina Inga Britta Olin in 1951. There were two children, Clas and Henrik, who appeared with their father in Hawaii as his sons at different ages. Von Sydow and Christina divorced in 1979, and in 1997 he married the French film producer Catherine Brelet.