The actor who played chess with Death

Max von Sydow was a striking presence in Hollywood and European cinema for seven decades. Standing a gaunt 6-foot-4 and possessing piercing blue eyes, the Swedish actor was best known to U.S. audiences as the titular priest in The Exorcist (1973), the anti-social artist in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and the enigmatic Three-Eyed Raven in HBO’s Game of Thrones. But his most critically acclaimed performances were those directed by Ingmar Bergman. In The Seventh Seal (1957), his first of 11 movies under the legendary Swedish filmmaker, von Sydow plays a disillusioned medieval knight who challenges Death to a game of chess. His subtle portrayal of a man in spiritual turmoil showed a maturity far beyond his years. “Simplicity,” the actor explained, “is a good method.”

Von Sydow was born in Lund, Sweden, to a folklore professor father and schoolteacher mother. He fell in love with theater “after seeing his first play, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, at age 14,” said the Associated Press, and soon found that acting helped him overcome his own shyness. After studying acting in Stockholm, von Sydow moved to Malmo

Max von Sydow

in 1955 and began working with Bergman, then director of the city’s leading theater, said The Guardian (U.K.). “Following The Seventh Seal, von Sydow played in six somber films in a row for Bergman.” He was a 19th-century mesmerist and magician in The Face (1958) and the vengeful father of a raped girl in The Virgin Spring (1960). His growing arthouse fame earned Hollywood’s attention, and after repeatedly refusing roles, he agreed to play Jesus Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told.

That 1965 “all-star epic was a flop,” said The Washington Post. Worse, for von Sydow, it begot “decades of typecasting in Hollywood” as stern priests and stereotypical villains, including an otherworldly tyrant in Flash Gordon (1980) and James Bond’s nemesis Blofeld in Never Say Never Again (1983). Von Sydow did more serious work in Europe, earning his first Oscar nomination in 1988 for the Danish film Pelle the Conqueror, about a widowed Swedish laborer. Famously humble, he was happy to be shaped by directors. Von Sydow recalled his last conversation with Bergman, who died in 2007: “He said, ‘Max, you have been the first and the best Stradivarius that I have ever had in my hands.’”