Vast career spanned stage and screen
Actor
SWEDISH actor Max von
Sydow was the stately import whose theatre roots laid the groundwork for a vast onscreen career in nearly a dozen Ingmar Bergman productions as well as defining roles in The Greatest Story Ever Told, The Exorcist and Game of Thrones.
The twotime Oscar nominee died on March 8. He was 90.
The veteran actor’s rich repertoire included Jesus Christ, clergymen, pontiffs, knights, conquerors, attorneys, sinister doctors, stateside villains and the devil incarnate — and that was just on film. Von Sydow continued to work in theatre and smaller Swedish projects in his later years.
In a career that stretches from 1949 onwards, there was rarely a year when he did not have a project in movie houses.
Many of his films — and there are more than 100 of them — are considered classics, beginning with his early work with Swedish filmmaker and former mentor Bergman. Von Sydow hit the global stage playing chess with Death in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal in 1957. It was the first of 11 memorable films with Bergman as part of the filmmaker’s repertory company of actors.
He last worked with the filmmaker on the TV movie Private Confessions (1998), written by Bergman and directed by Liv Ullman, a frequent costar of Von Sydow’s.
“Whatever good I have done on screen I owe to Bergman,’’ Von Sydow has said.
After making his US debut as Jesus Christ in George Stevens’ final film, 1965’s The Greatest Story Ever Told, Von Sydow built up an impressively varied body of work that included The
Exorcist, Three Days of the Condor and Shutter Island.
Von Sydow was only 43 when he played Father Merrin, the titular Jesuit priest in The Exorcist.
Makeup artist Dick Miller added years to his visage and the actor earned his second Golden Globe nomination for the role (his first was for 1966’s Hawaii with Julie Andrews and Richard Harris) and the horror classic was among his biggest boxoffice successes.
His portrayal of an impoverished farm worker in 1988’s Pelle the Conqueror by Danish filmmaker Bille
August, is often considered one of his greatest roles and it brought him worldwide acclaim as well as his first lead actor Oscar nomination.
VON SYDOW also made his fair share of popcorn vehicles — out of “curiosity” and a need for “change”. The art house regular was generally cast as the international villain, appearing in campy fare such as Flash Gordon Dune or Judge Dredd
with Sylvester Stallone.
He played the sodden King Osric in Conan the Barbarian
and the dapper assassin in the fedora in Three Days of the Condor.
Von Sydow’s lateinlife roles capitalised on his advanced age and he appeared in highprofile genre parts in The Simpsons, Game of Thrones and Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.
His fantasy work in Thrones
clinched him a second Primetime Emmy Award nomination in 2016. (He earned his first nod for 1989’s Red King, White Night.)
His 2012 turn in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, earned him his second Oscar nomination. The octogenarian actor had no spoken lines in the post9/11 drama but was unforgettable nonetheless, as his Renter character communicated through writing.
At 192cm, Von Sydow was a commanding presence wherever he appeared and paid meticulous attention to tiny details in his work, which explains why many film experts consider him to be one of the giants of international cinema. His peers often remarked on his mastery and how decent, generous and courteous he seemed.
“He has such tremendous technique, but it’s all invisible,” said noted director Scott Hicks, who worked with Von Sydow on Shine and Snow Falling on Cedars in the 1990s.
Born in 1929 as Carl Adolf von Sydow in Lund, Skane, Sweden, Von Sydow grew up in an aristocratic middleclass family as the son of Baroness Maria Margareta, who was a teacher, and Carl Wilhelm von Sydow, an ethnologist and folklore professor at the University of Lund.
There was no theatre in his hometown and his parents were not much for going out. Von Sydow remembered being taken to the pictures by his father only twice. Seeing a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream in the next town was lifechanging and prompted him to start a drama group at his high school. After completing compulsory military service he applied to the Royal Academy in Stockholm and was accepted.
He made his debut in a small part as the Prince of Orange in Goethe’s Egmont, and it was “almost a disaster”, he said.
And although the whole production indeed proved to be a disaster, Von Sydow got good reviews as a promising newcomer.
Years in provincial theatre followed. The work trained him early on to appreciate the variety of roles.
AT the last of three repertory companies, the director was Bergman and Von Sydow had made two films before Bergman cast him in The Seventh Seal, giving a mesmerising performance as a 14thcentury knight who challenges Death to a game of chess, which catapulted the Swedish actor on to the international scene.
Von Sydow first travelled to Hollywood to meet The Greatest Story Ever Told director Stevens to play Jesus Christ in the biblical epic.
It was Von Sydow’s first Englishlanguage production.
In 1951, he married actress Christina Inga Britta Olin and together they had two sons, Clas and Henrik. He and Olin divorced in 1979. Von Sydow later moved to Paris with his second wife, documentarian Catherine Brelet, whom he wed in 1997.
He surrendered his Swedish citizenship to become a French national in 2002.
Although some Swedishlanguage projects continued to pepper his resume, he missed his home country, specifically the ability to express himself accurately.
He said that he would like to be remembered “as a competent actor”.
“What will probably stick are the films, unfortunately; people who have been to the [live] theatre have memories of things that are not visible, and only in the memories of the audience. I just hope they remember something I’ve done — whatever it is — that something I’ve done has meant something.” — Los Angeles Times