![]() ![]() They continued working together throughout the Sixties, a decade during which von Sydow alternated between film and theater. The film has since become one of both Bergman and von Sydow’s most celebrated works. In that film, he played Antonius Block, a pensive knight returning home from the Crusades who challenges Death to a game of chess. Young Carl studied at the Royal Dramatic Theater School in Stockholm.Īlthough he made his film debut using the name Max (picked because it was the name of the star of a flea circus he’d seen while in the army, according to The New York Times) in the 1949 picture Only a Mother, directed by Alf Sjöberg, he would appear in only a handful of movies - including Sjöberg’s adaptation of Miss Julie - before his breakout role in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. His mother, Baroness Maria Margareta, was a teacher, and his father, Carl Wilhelm von Sydow, was a professor of comparative folklore. ![]() Von Sydow was born Carl Adolf von Sydow in Lund, Sweden, on April 10th, 1929. Von Sydow kept a busy schedule of projects up to his death, and is slated to appear in filmmaker Nicholas Dimitropoulos’ upcoming Echoes of the Past. He memorably played the partner of Barbara Hershey’s character in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters and the deceitful Lamar Burgess, a director of a futuristic police force, in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. Known for his versatility, von Sydow also appeared in Footloose, Flash Gordon, Conan the Barbarian, Strange Brew, and Dune, among others. He was also nominated for multiple Emmys, for playing the three-eyed raven on Game of Thrones and for the 1989 miniseries Red King, White Night. Von Sydow was nominated for an Oscar in 1987, for his portrayal of a Swedish emigrant fighting for a better life for his son in Pelle the Conquereor, and again in 2012, for playing a man suffering PTSD in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. He later found Hollywood success by playing the title role of Father Merrin in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, for which he wore heavy makeup to appear older. He frequently played men in existential pain, grappling with their own existence. The Swedish actor became a breakout star in the late Fifties and early Sixties through a succession of Bergman films, including Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring, and Through a Glass Darkly. “It is with a broken heart and with infinite sadness that we have the extreme pain of announcing the departure of Max von Sydow on 8 March 2020,” she said, according to The Guardian. His wife, Catherine Brelet, announced the news without citing a cause of death in Paris Match. Max von Sydow, the Oscar-nominated actor best known for playing chess with Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and battling a demon in The Exorcist, died Sunday.
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