- Born
- Died
- Birth nameCarl Adolf von Sydow
- Height6′ 3½″ (1.92 m)
- Max von Sydow was born Carl Adolf von Sydow on April 10, 1929 in Lund, Skåne, Sweden, to a middle-class family. He was the son of Baroness Maria Margareta (Rappe), a teacher, and Carl Wilhelm von Sydow, an ethnologist and folklore professor. His surname traces back to his partial German ancestry.
When he was in high school, he and a few fellow students, including Yvonne Lombard, started a theatre club which encouraged his interest in acting. After conscription, he began to study at the Royal Dramatic Theatre's acting school (1948-1951), together with Lars Ekborg, Margaretha Krook and Ingrid Thulin. His first role was as Nils the crofter in Alf Sjöberg's Only a Mother (1949). After graduation, he worked at the city theatres in Norrköping and Malmö.
His work in the movies by Ingmar Bergman (especially The Seventh Seal (1957), including the iconic scenes in which he plays chess with Death) made him well-known internationally, and he started to get offers from abroad. His career abroad began with him playing Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965); Hawaii (1966) and The Quiller Memorandum (1966). Since then, his career includes very different kind of characters, like Karl Oskar Nilsson in The Emigrants (1971); Father Lankester Merrin in The Exorcist (1973); Joubert the assassin in Three Days of the Condor (1975), Emperor Ming in Flash Gordon (1980); the villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the Never Say Never Again (1983); Liet-Kynes in Dune (1984) the artist Frederick in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986); Lassefar in Pelle the Conqueror (1987), for which he received his first Academy Award nomination; Dr. Peter Ingham in Awakenings (1990); Lamar Burgess in Minority Report (2002) and The Renter in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011), which earned him his second Academy Award nomination.
He became one of Sweden's most admired and professional actors, and is the only male Swedish actor to receive an Oscar nomination. He was nominated twice: for Pelle the Conqueror (1987) in 1988 and for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011) in 2012. He received the Guldbagge Award for Best Director in his directing debut, the drama film Ved vejen (1988). In 2016, he joined the sixth season of the HBO series Game of Thrones (2011) as the Three-eyed Raven, which earned him his Primetime Emmy Award nomination.
Max von Sydow died on March 8, 2020, in Provence, France, and was survived by his wife Catherine Brelet and four children. He was 90.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Mattias Thuresson
- SpousesCatherine Brelet(April 30, 1997 - March 8, 2020) (his death, 2 children)Christina Olin(August 1, 1951 - 1979) (divorced, 2 children)
- ChildrenAdopted Child
- ParentsMaria Margareta RappeCarl Wilhelm von Sydow
- Deep commanding voice
- His towering height, sandy hair and thin face
- Often played stern, oppressive characters
- Often appeared in Ingmar Bergman's films
- His ability to convincingly portray deeply complex emotions with minimal dialogue
- Fluent in a number of languages, including Swedish, English, French and Italian.
- He appeared in 13 films directed by Ingmar Bergman: The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), Mr. Sleeman Is Coming (1957), Brink of Life (1958), The Magician (1958), Rabies (1958), The Virgin Spring (1960), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963), Hour of the Wolf (1968), Shame (1968), The Passion of Anna (1969) and The Touch (1971).
- He was offered the title role in the first James Bond film Dr. No (1962), which went to Joseph Wiseman.
- He was one of the few actors to have played both God (in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)) and the Devil (in Needful Things (1993)).
- He was one of six Swedish actors to be nominated for an Academy Award. The others are Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, Ann-Margret, Lena Olin and Alicia Vikander. von Sydow is the only male Swedish actor to be nominated for an Oscar.
- The theater is more a medium for an actor than the cinema is. You are totally responsible for what you do on the stage; in a film, someone else can come in and edit you and do something totally different to what you had in mind originally, and they can cut you out, play around with the scenes or the chronology of the story. This happens always-more or less-in the cinema. On the stage, you deliver a performance and that is your responsibility. So filmmaking is much more a director's medium than it is an actor's.
- If I watch my old films, for example The Seventh Seal (1957), I realize I do a lot of stage acting there; I have always been disturbed by the declamatory fashion in which I speak in a film like that. But then television suddenly swept through Sweden, and we were all soon accustomed to realism, from newsreels, talk shows, and then of course there was the Method school of acting, which exerted an influence in Europe also. Today, theater actors, and film actors with a stage background, use a different style to the one we subscribed to during the 1940s and 1950s. Bergman's dialog in those days was very stylized, so it would have been difficult for me to speak those lines realistically.
- Sometimes I receive strange letters, and occasionally people come up to me in the street and say odd things. They want to be deceived, so it is difficult to disabuse them. At times, it is tiring not to be allowed to be a private person. If you are really marked out as a film star in the United States, then it must be absolutely exhausting and hard to maintain your integrity. Fortunately, Swedes are very reserved as a people and seldom show their emotions or feelings in public, so one is not subject to that kind of pressure in the country where I come from.
- I admire people like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Marlon Brando, Spencer Tracy, who seem to be so very real-I don't know how they do it. When I was young, I admired Leslie Howard enormously, in films like The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), Gone with the Wind (1939), and Pygmalion (1938). Also Gary Cooper; perhaps he was not a great actor, but he had a great presence.
- At home [in Sweden], the actor's profession was not considered particularly reputable, but being an actor or star in a Hollywood film was something very important in American eyes. Then I slowly realized that as an actor in Sweden you were allowed to be involved in some kind of artistic project which could be a flop and yet still be justifiable if it carried artistic weight and ambitions. In Hollywood, on the other hand, if you do not succeed you are nobody. You become a mere piece of paper with a figure on it. You are just as good-or bad-as your last film was financially. And while Sweden remains sufficiently small for you to work in, say, Malmö and still make films in Stockholm, in the States you either work in Hollywood or you live somewhere else and you work for the legitimate theater.
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