Max von Sydow obit

Max von Sydow obituary

Swedish stage and screen actor who starred in The Seventh Seal, The Exorcist and Flash Gordon

He was not on the list.

The great Swedish film and stage actor Max von Sydow, who has died aged 90, will be remembered by different people for different roles: the title role in The Exorcist, Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told, and his Oscar-nominated part as the slave-driven Lasse in Pelle the Conqueror, but his passport to cinema heaven will be his many remarkable performances under the direction of Ingmar Bergman.

The tall, gaunt and imposing blond Von Sydow, pronounced Suedorff, made his mark internationally in 1957 as the disillusioned 14th-century knight Antonius Block, in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

Returning from the crusades to his plague-stricken country, he finds that he has lost his faith in God and can no longer pray. Suddenly, he is confronted by the personification of Death. Seeking more time on Earth, he challenges Death to a game of chess. Von Sydow’s portrayal of a man in spiritual turmoil demonstrated a maturity beyond his years and was to exemplify his solemn and dignified persona in further Bergman films, even extending to some of his less worthier enterprises.

Although it was the actor’s first film for Bergman, they had worked together at the Municipal theatre in Malmö on several plays and would continue to do so between films. From 1956 to 1958, for Bergman, Von Sydow played Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Peer in Peer Gynt, Alceste in The Misanthrope and Faust in Urfaust. In the same company were Gunnar Björnstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson and Gunnel Lindblom, who, with Von Sydow, were to become part of the Bergman repertory company of the screen.

He was born Carl Adolph Von Sydow – later taking the name Max – to an academic family in Lund, southern Sweden. His father, Carl Wilhelm, was an ethnologist and professor of comparative folklore at the university of Lund; his mother, Maria Margareta (nee Rappe), was a school teacher.

He attended a Catholic school before doing his military service. From 1948 to 1951, Von Sydow attended the acting school at the Royal Dramatic theatre in Stockholm; while still a student there, he had small parts in two films directed by Alf Sjöberg, Only a Mother (1949) and Miss Julie (1951). After graduating, Von Sydow, who had married Christina Olin in 1951, joined the Municipal theatre in Helsingborg before moving to Malmö, which resulted in the significant meeting with Bergman.

ollowing The Seventh Seal, Von Sydow played in six sombre films in a row for Bergman; he was quite content to play supporting roles when asked. He had a small part in Wild Strawberries (1957), and was rather peripheral in Brink of Life (1957), as Eva Dahlbeck’s husband, waiting calmly for his wife to have a baby (which she loses), but was central in The Face (1958, later known as The Magician). As Vogler, a 19th-century mesmerist and magician, Von Sydow embodies admirably the part-charlatan, part-messiah character.

It was back to medieval Sweden in The Virgin Spring (1960), with Von Sydow as the vengeful father of a girl who has been raped and murdered. In Through a Glass Darkly (1961), he was the anguished husband of Harriet Andersson, watching his wife lapsing into insanity, and in Winter Light (1962), he was a man terrified of nuclear annihilation.

Von Sydow refused offers of work outside Sweden, even the title role in the first James Bond movie, Dr No (1962), though two decades later he played the evil genius Blofeld to Sean Connery’s Bond in Never Say Never Again, 1983. He finally gave in when George Stevens begged him to play Jesus in his 225-minute epic The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). However, despite Von Sydow’s charisma, the epic turned out to be Jesus Christ Superbore.

His next two Hollywood movies were not much better: The Reward (1965), in which he was an impoverished crop-dusting pilot trapped in the Mexican desert, and Hawaii (1966), as an unbending and arrogant missionary who makes no effort to understand the islanders. Von Sydow’s two sons played his son in the film, aged seven (Henrik), and 12 (Clas). The scheming German aristocrat in The Quiller Memorandum (1966) was the first of many bad Germans he would play well.

Complex roles in four films for Bergman temporarily stopped the rot: as an artist subject to terrible nightmares and hallucinations in Hour of the Wolf (1968); as a big, gangling innocent forced to face reality in Shame (1968), a powerful parable in which he was allowed to improvise some of his dialogue for the first time; as a man whose peaceful seclusion is disturbed by a woman recovering from the car accident that killed her husband and son (Liv Ullmann), as well as a warring couple and a homicidal maniac in The Passion of Anna (1969); and as the cold cuckolded doctor husband of Bibi Andersson in The Touch (1971), Bergman’s first English-language film.

Von Sydow and Ullmann suffered beautifully as poor Swedish peasants trying to survive in 19th-century Minnesota in Jan Troell’s diptych, The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972). It was almost inevitable that Von Sydow should be cast as the Jesuit priest, Father Merrin, in William Friedkin’s pretentious shocker The Exorcist (1973) after having gone through so many metaphysical crises in Bergman films. His craggy features haunt the film and its shoddy sequel The Exorcist II – The Heretic (1977).

On the whole, his films tended to oscillate between the serious and the silly. Among the former were Steppenwolf (1974), in which he played Hermann Hesse’s alter ego Harry Haller, a disillusioned man going on a spiritual journey; Duet for One (1986), in which he was the callous, death-fearing psychoanalyst; and Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), where he was a prickly, antisocial artist. Allen has said that the only two actors he directed of whom he found himself in awe were Von Sydow and Geraldine Page.

On the more ridiculous side were his Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon (1980), and King Osric in Conan the Barbarian (1982), through which he managed to keep a straight face – and there was no straighter face in films than Von Sydow’s.

He felt much more in his element in Bille August’s Pelle the Conqueror (1987), which won the best foreign film Oscar. Von Sydow elegantly captured the simple grandeur of an illiterate widowed farmer who leaves a poverty-stricken Sweden for a Danish island with his nine-year-old son, to find himself almost a slave on a farm.

Von Sydow reconnected with Bergman when he played the latter’s maternal grandfather in The Best Intentions (1992), directed by August from Bergman’s autobiographical script.

However, his portrayal of the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun in the biopic Hamsun (1996), directed by Troell, was far too sympathetic for a man who tried to rationalise his admiration for Hitler.

“Why me?” was Von Sydow’s reaction to the director Jonathan Miller, after he had been cast as Prospero in The Tempest at the Old Vic, in 1988. “Do you have to cross the river to fetch water when you have so many wonderful actors in England?” But Miller was justified in his choice because Von Sydow brought the aura of the Bergman films to the role as well as authority and warmth.

In 1988, he directed Katinka, a simple tale about a woman stifled by a loveless marriage, which made little impact. Von Sydow was glad to have made it, but said that he would never direct again. He continued to alternate between mainstream Hollywood (he was in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, 2002), and more challenging material such as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), mostly in small scene-stealing roles.

He was a sinister German doctor in Martin Scorsese’s psychological thriller Shutter Island (2010); a mysterious mute in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011), for which he received his second Oscar nomination; Lor San Tekka in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015); and the Three-Eyed Raven in the sixth season of Game of Thrones (2016). His last film role came in Thomas Vinterberg’s Kursk (2018).

He and Olin divorced in 1979; in 1997 he married the French film-maker Catherine Brelet, and they settled in Paris (Von Sydow became a French citizen in 2002). He is survived by Brelet and their sons, Cédric and Yvan, and by Henrik and Clas, the sons of his first marriage.

Filmography

Film

Von Sydow appeared in the following films:

Year     Title     Role     Director           Notes

1949    Only a Mother             Nils      Alf Sjöberg      

1951    Miss Julie         Hand   

1953    Ingen mans kvinna [sv]           Olaf     Lars-Eric Kjellgren      

1956    Rätten att älska [sv]    Bergman         Mimi Pollak    

1957    The Seventh Seal         Antonius Block            Ingmar Bergman        

Wild Strawberries       Henrik Åkerman         

Prästen i Uddarbo [sv]            Gustaf Ömark Kenne Fant     

1958    Brink of Life     Harry Andersson         Ingmar Bergman        

Rabies Bo Stensson Svenningson      

The Magician Albert Emanuel Vogler           

Kvinnlig spion 503       Tysk topagent Horst    Jørn Jeppesen

1960    The Virgin Spring         Töre     Ingmar Bergman        

The Wedding Day [sv]             Anders Frost    Kenne Fant     

1961    Through a Glass Darkly           Martin Ingmar Bergman        

1962    Adventures of Nils Holgersson           The Father       Kenne Fant     

The Mistress    Married Man   Vilgot Sjöman

1963    Winter Light    Jonas Persson Ingmar Bergman        

1965    4x4      Kvist     Jan Troell        

The Greatest Story Ever Told Jesus Christ     George Stevens          

The Reward     Scott Swenson            Serge Bourguignon    

1966    Hawaii Reverend Abner Hale George Roy Hill          

The Quiller Memorandum      Oktober           Michael Anderson      

Here's Your Life           Smålands-Pelle            Jan Troell        

1968    Hour of the Wolf         Johan Borg      Ingmar Bergman        

Black Palm Trees [sv] Gustav Olofsson          Lars-Magnus Lindgren           

Shame Jan Rosenberg             Ingmar Bergman        

1969    Made in Sweden         Magnus Rud    Johan Bergenstråhle  

The Passion of Anna   Andreas Winkelman   Ingmar Bergman        

1970    The Kremlin Letter      Colonel Kosnov           John Huston   

1971    The Night Visitor         Salem László Benedek          

The Emigrants             Karl Oskar        Jan Troell        

The Touch       Andreas Vergerus       Ingmar Bergman        

The Apple War            Roy Lindberg   Tage Danielsson         

1972    Embassy          Gorenko          Gordon Hessler          

The New Land Karl Oskar        Jan Troell        

1973    The Exorcist     Father Lankester Merrin         William Friedkin         

1974    Steppenwolf    Harry Haller    Fred Haines    

1975    Egg! Egg! A Hardboiled Story The Father       Hans Alfredson           

Le miroir éclate           Matthew Lawrence     Claude d'Anna            

Three Days of the Condor       G. Joubert       Sydney Pollack           

The Ultimate Warrior The Baron        Robert Clouse

1976    Dog's Heart     Professor Filipp Filippovich Preobrazenski     Alberto Lattuada        

Illustrious Corpses       Supreme Court's President     Francesco Rosi           

Foxtrot            Larsen Arturo Ripstein           

The Desert of the Tartars        Hortiz Valerio Zurlini

Voyage of the Damned           Captain Schroeder      Stuart Rosenberg       

1977    Exorcist II: The Heretic            Father Lankester Merrin         John Boorman            

March or Die   François Marneau       Dick Richards  

Black Journal   Lisa Carpi         Mauro Bolognini        

1978    Brass Target    Shelley             John Hough    

1979    Hurricane        Dr Danielsson Jan Troell        

Bugie bianche Marcello Herrighe      Stefano Rolla [it]        

1980    Death Watch   Gerald Mortenhoe      Bertrand Tavernier    

Flash Gordon   Ming the Merciless     Mike Hodges  

1981    Escape to Victory        Major Karl von Steiner            John Huston   

1982    Conan the Barbarian   King Osric        John Milius     

Flight of the Eagle       Salomon August Andrée         Jan Troell        

Hit Man [fr]     Colonel O'Donnell       José Antonio de la Loma [es]

1983    Le Cercle des passions [fr]      Carlo di Vilalfratti        Claude d'Anna            

Strange Brew Brewmeister Smith     Rick Moranis

Dave Thomas Brilliant!!!

Never Say Never Again           Ernst Stavro Blofeld    Irvin Kershner

1984    Dreamscape    Doctor Paul Novotny Joseph Ruben

Dune    Doctor Kynes   David Lynch    

1985    Code Name: Emerald Jurgen Brausch            Jonathan Sanger        

The Repenter Spinola            Pasquale Squitieri      

1986    Hannah and Her Sisters          Frederick         Woody Allen  

The Second Victory     Dr Huber         Gerald Thomas           

The Wolf at the Door August Strindberg       Henning Carlsen         

Duet for One   Dr Louis Feldman        Andrei Konchalovsky

1987    Pelle the Conqueror    Lassefar Karlsson        Bille August    

1988    Katinka                        Himself           

1989    Ghostbusters II            Vigo (voice)     Ivan Reitman  

1990    The Bachelor   Von Schleheim            Roberto Faenza          

A Violent Life   Pope Clement VII        Giacomo Battiato       

Father Joe Mueller     John Power    

Awakenings     Dr Peter Ingham          Penny Marshall          

1991    A Kiss Before Dying     Thor Carlsson James Dearden          

Europa             Narrator (voice)          Lars von Trier

Until the End of the World     Henry Farber   Wim Wenders            

The Ox             Vicar    Sven Nykvist   

The Best Intentions     Johan Åkerblom          Bille August    

1992    The Silent Touch [pl]   Henry Kesdi     Krzysztof Zanussi        

1993    Grandpa's Journey      Simon S.L. Fromm       Staffan Lamm [sv]      

Needful Things            Leland Gaunt   Fraser C. Heston         

1994    Time is Money            Joe Kaufman   Paolo Barzman           

1995    Judge Dredd    Judge Fargo     Danny Cannon           

1996    Hamsun           Knut Hamsun Jan Troell        

Jerusalem        Vicar    Bille August    

1997    Hercules          Zeus     Ron Clements   John Musker Swedish dub

1998    What Dreams May Come       The Tracker     Vincent Ward

1999    Snow Falling on Cedars           Nels Gudmundsson     Scott Hicks      

2001    Sleepless         Ulisse Moretti Dario Argento

Druids Guttuart          Jacques Dorfmann     

Intacto             Samuel            Juan Carlos Fresnadillo          

2002    Minority Report          Director Lamar Burgess          Steven Spielberg        

Les amants de Mogador                     Souheil Ben-Barka      

2005    Heidi    Uncle Alp         Paul Marcus   

2006    The Inquiry      Tiberius           Giulio Base     

2007    Rush Hour 3    Varden Reynard          Brett Ratner   

Emotional Arithmetic Jakob Bronski Paolo Barzman           

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly        Papinou           Julian Schnabel          

2009    Solomon Kane             Josiah Kane     Michael J. Bassett      

A Man and His Dog     The Commander         Francis Huster             Cameo

2010    Shutter Island Dr Jeremiah Naehring             Martin Scorsese         

Robin Hood     Sir Walter Loxley         Ridley Scott    

Moomins and the Comet Chase         Narrator (voice)          Maria Lindberg          

The Wolfman Passenger on train (uncredited)         Joe Johnston   Director's cut

2011    Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close     The Renter      Stephen Daldry          

2012    Truth & Treason          Frank Fikeis                

Branded          Joseph Pascal Jamie Bradshaw

& Aleksandr Dulerayn            

2013    Dragons 3D     Dr Alistair Conis          Marc Fafard   

2015    The Letters      Father Celeste van Exem        William Riead

Star Wars: The Force Awakens           Lor San Tekka J. J. Abrams    

2016    The First, the Last        The Undertaker           Bouli Lanners

2018    Kursk   Vladimir Petrenko       Thomas Vinterberg    

TBA      Echoes of the Past      Nikolas Andreou (aged)          Nicholas Dimitropoulos          Post-production

Television

Year     Title     Role     Notes

1957    Herr Sleeman kommer           The Hunter      Television film

1967    The Diary of Anne Frank         Otto Frank       Television film

1973    Kvartetten som sprängdes      Engineer Planertz        4 episodes

1984    Samson and Delilah    Sidka    Television film

The Soldier's Tale        The Devil (voice)         Television film

Le Dernier Civil            Johann Kaspar Bäuerle           Television film

1985    Kojak: The Belarus File            Peter Barak     Television film

The Last Place on Earth           Fridtjof Nansen           3 episodes

Quo Vadis?      The Apostle Peter       6 episodes

Christopher Columbus            King John of Portugal 4 episodes

1986    Gösta Berlings saga [sv]          Melchior Sinclaire       3 episodes

1989    Red King, White Knight           Szaz    

1990    Hiroshima: Out of the Ashes   Father Siemes Television film

1993    Och ge oss skuggorna Eugene O'Neill            Television film

The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles Sigmund Freud            Episode: "Vienna, November 1908"

1994    A che punto è la notte [it]       Archbishop of Turin    Television film

Radetzkymarsch [de] Baron Franz von Trotta und Sipolje    2 episodes

Uncle Vanya    Professor Serebryakov            Television film

1995    Citizen X          Dr Alexandr Bukhanovsky      

1996    Samson and Delilah    Narrator (voice)          Uncredited

Television film

Private Confessions     Jacob   Television film

1997    Hostile Waters            Admiral Chernavin      Television film

La principessa e il povero [it] Epos    Television film

Solomon [it]    David   3 episodes

2000    Nuremberg      Samuel Rosenman      Episode #1.1

2004    Hidden Children – Escape of the Innocents [nl]         Valobra            Television film

Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King         Eyvind Television film

2009    The Tudors      Cardinal von Walburg             4 episodes

2014    The Simpsons Claus Sigler (voice)      Episode: "The War of Art"

2016    Game of Thrones        Three-eyed Raven       3 episodes