Max von Sydow
Max von Sydow is an actor, born 1929.
Max von Sydow was not yet thirty when he played the knight in The Seventh Seal, and the image of a gaunt Swede playing chess with Death on a beach followed him for the next sixty years. It was the first of eleven films he made with Ingmar Bergman, and that run, through The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, Hour of the Wolf and Shame, is one of the great actor and director partnerships in cinema.
He then did something unusual for a European art house lead. He took the work, all of it. Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told, Father Merrin in The Exorcist, the courteous assassin in Three Days of the Condor, Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon, a Bond villain in Never Say Never Again, the king in Conan the Barbarian, the planetologist in the 1984 Dune. He appeared in more than 150 films across several languages and refused to condescend to any of them. His Merrin is the reason The Exorcist works: an old man who knows exactly what he is walking into and walks in anyway.
Two Academy Award nominations bracket the late career, for Pelle the Conqueror in 1987 and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close in 2011, the second for a part with no spoken dialogue at all. He kept working into his eighties, in Shutter Island, Minority Report and Star Wars, and died in 2020 at ninety. Very few actors have been at home in both Bergman and Flash Gordon.
Movies (67)
- Shutter Island (2010)
- The Exorcist (1973)
- Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)
- Minority Report (2002)
- Conan the Barbarian (1982)
- Rush Hour 3 (2007)
- Dune (1984)
- Judge Dredd (1995)
- Robin Hood (2010)
- Never Say Never Again (1983)
- The Seventh Seal (1957)
- The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)
- Flash Gordon (1980)
- What Dreams May Come (1998)
- Awakenings (1990)
- Three Days of the Condor (1975)
- Wild Strawberries (1957)
- Solomon Kane (2009)
- Escape to Victory (1981)
- Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
- Kursk (2018)
- Needful Things (1993)
- Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011)
- Ring of the Nibelungs (2004)
- Solomon (1997)
- Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
- The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)
- Citizen X (1995)
- The Virgin Spring (1960)
- Until the End of the World (1991)
TV (3)
Where to start with Max von Sydow
The Seventh Seal is not the homework you fear: it is short, funny in places, and built around a face that carries doubt better than any other in film. Follow it with The Virgin Spring for the harshest Bergman he made, or Wild Strawberries for the gentlest.
For the other von Sydow, The Exorcist holds the essential performance, a small role that gives the entire film its moral weight. Three Days of the Condor casts him as a polite professional far more interesting than the hero. Flash Gordon is camp and he plays it completely straight, which is why it works. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is the late one, a wordless performance in a flawed film, worth it for him alone.
The Bergman films
Eleven collaborations across fifteen years, and the foundation of everything that followed. The Seventh Seal is the famous one, but Winter Light and Shame are the performances that show what Bergman actually wanted from him.
The American horror and thrillers
Father Merrin arrives in the last act of The Exorcist and the film reorganises itself around him. Three Days of the Condor gives him a contract killer with impeccable manners, and it is the coldest thing he did.
The blockbusters and villains
Ming the Merciless, Blofeld, a Conan king and a Star Wars elder. He took these entirely seriously, which is why Flash Gordon works at all and why the Bond film is better than its reputation.
The late dramatic work
Pelle the Conqueror brought a Best Actor nomination at fifty eight and Extremely Loud brought another fifty five years after his debut, the second played entirely without speaking.