Brooding star of angsty Bergman films, The Exorcist and Game of Thrones

Max von Sydow, who has died aged 90, starred in brooding, metaphysical masterpieces by Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, notably as the medieval knight stalked by Death in a game of chess, and later brought Nordic gravitas to a breathtaking array of roles, from Jesus to Satan.

Von Sydow did not transform the craft of acting in the way Marlon Brando did, nor did he epitomise the classical tradition as vividly as Laurence Olivier. But over a hectic career spanning seven decades and more than 150 movies, the breadth and lucidity of his performances elevated him to the highest echelon of international cinema.

Some of his bestremembered performances included the aged Jesuit priest battling for the soul of a possessed young girl in The Exorcist (1973), a dapper contract assassin in Three Days of the Condor (1975), a moody artist in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), a corrupt crime unit supervisor in Minority Report (2002) and a roguish French widower who struggles with his mortality and his son’s crippling stroke in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007).

Critics showered him with superlatives. In 2015, Terrence Rafferty called 86-year-old von Sydow, then appearing in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and in Game of Thrones, the ‘‘greatest actor alive’’ for imbuing even the humblest of roles with a rich expressiveness. ‘‘Like a novelist,’’ Rafferty wrote, ‘‘he finds the human details that vivify the character.’’

A sinewy 6ft 4in, with a blond crewcut, electric-blue eyes and a craggy, granite face, von Sydow was one of the screen’s most imposing male performers. He achieved cinematic immortality in The Seventh Seal (1957), as a weary, soul-battered veteran of the Crusades who has come home to a Scandinavia terrorised by the plague.

On a rocky seaside, he begins a chess game with Death to forestall the inevitable. The film was a watershed for moviemaking that aspired to high art.

Von Sydow appeared in 10 more Bergman movies over the next 15 years, taking roles in films such as Wild Strawberries (1957), Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and The Hour of the Wolf (1966). He said he had no ambitions for a career outside Sweden, but faced an avalanche of offers after starring in Bergman’s Oscar-winning The Virgin Spring (1960). He turned down the title villain in the first Bond film, Dr No, but eventually agreed to play Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), studying English for more than a year to prepare for the role.

The all-star epic was a flop, which von Sydow blamed on director George Stevens. ‘‘He tried to make the ultimate version of the life of Christ in order to satisfy everybody, not stepping on anybody’s toes,’’ he said in 1988. ‘‘So, unfortunately the film turned out to be very beautiful but very boring, and a lot of walking, very serious walking.’’

For von Sydow, the film begot decades of typecasting in Hollywood, where he played stern men of the cloth as well as lugubrious villains. Initially, he seemed to be poised for a significant Hollywood career, but he said he disliked being part of a film colony where ‘‘even people who were not in the industry seemed to be acting parts’’. He instead made his home in Rome and Paris, collecting fat paycheques from campy, English-language fare while aiming higher in European productions.

He explained that he was a working actor and felt no shame that a Bergman stalwart should play Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon (1980), the cat-stroking Bond villain Ernst Blofeld in Never Say Never Again (1983) and an evil brewmeister in the Canadian romp Strange Brew (1983).

He confessed disappointment not in the calibre of the films but in the restrictiveness of his roles. ‘‘Because I am not English or American, the parts I get are the foreigners. And who is the foreigner? He is either the villain or the mad scientist or the sane scientist or the psychoanalyst or the artist. But always an outsider.’’

He found greater artistic fulfillment working in Europe, received an Oscar nomination for his leading role in Pelle the Conqueror (1987), about a widowed Swedish farmhand who moves to Denmark with his young son in search of a better life and suffers endless indignities. The film’s producer, Per Holst, once told the New York Times that he initially worried that he could not afford someone of von Sydow’s stature for the modestly budgeted film. He called the actor’s agent, who said von Sydow was aboard as long as the ‘‘usual arrangements’’ were in place – planes at his disposal between takes, chauffeur-driven limos, champagne at his breakfast table.

‘‘I thought, ‘Oh, God, how am I going to pay for all this,’ before I heard loud laughing at the other end of the phone,’’ Holst said. ‘‘He was joking, of course. Max was never difficult, never made special demands, and he stayed in the same small huts as everyone else.’’

Max Carl Adolf von Sydow was born in Lund, Sweden, and grew up burdened by shyness. A class trip to see Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream at a majestic new theatre in the nearby city of Malmo sparked a fascination with acting.

After mandatory army service, he enrolled at the Royal Dramatic Theatre school in Stockholm. By the time he graduated, in 1951, he had appeared in films and had begun to establish a reputation as a gifted repertory stage performer. Bergman was chief director at the Malmo municipal theatre and guided von Sydow’s stage performances before casting him in The Seventh Seal.

His first marriage, to actress Christina Olin, ended in divorce. In 1997, he married Catherine Brelet, a French documentarian, and soon acquired French citizenship.

‘‘I think I have achieved,’’ he told the

Times, ‘‘a certain simplicity, and economy of expression. If you are new in a sport, for example, you use too many muscles. The same thing is true in acting, because you want to express everything, all the time.’’ – Washington Post