Max von Sydow
Carl Adolf von Sydow (10 April 1929 – 8 March 2020) was a Swedish actor and director. He had a 70-year career in European and American cinema, television, and theatre. Von Sydow was best known for playing the 14th-century knight Antonius Block in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. He appeared in a total of 11 films directed by Bergman.
About Max von Sydow in brief
Carl Adolf von Sydow (10 April 1929 – 8 March 2020) was a Swedish actor and director. He had a 70-year career in European and American cinema, television, and theatre. Von Sydow was best known for playing the 14th-century knight Antonius Block in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. He appeared in a total of 11 films directed by Bergman, among which were The Virgin Spring and Through a Glass Darkly, both winners of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He received two Academy Award nominations for his performances in Pelle the Conqueror and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. He also had a supporting role in HBO’s Game of Thrones as the Three-eyed Raven, for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. He became a French citizen in 2002, and lived in France for the last decades of his life. He was of part-German ancestry. His paternal ancestor, David Sydow, emigrated from Pomerania to the Kalmar region in 1724. His mother, Baroness Maria Margareta Rappe, was a schoolteacher. He adopted the name ‘Max’ from the star performer of a flea circus he saw. He went on to star in films such as The Exorcist, Flash Gordon, Dune, Minority Report, Shutter Island, Robin Hood, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. He died in Paris, France, in 2020, at the age of 87. He is survived by his wife, two children, and a stepson.
His last role was in The Magician, in which he played a traveling illusionist who has come to be known as the Vogler. His final role was as a 19th- century knight returning from a plague-stricken Sweden. He played the title role in the play Henry IV, Henry IV. In 1954, he received the Royal Foundation of Sweden’s Cultural Award, a grant to young actors. In 1955, he moved on to the City Theatre in Hälsingborg, playing eleven parts in a two-year stint, including Prospero in The Tempest and the titular role of the Pirandello play Henry III. He made his American film debut as Jesus Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told. In 1951, he joined the Norrköping-Linköping Municipal Theatre, appearing in nine plays including Peer Gynt. In 1956, he appeared in The City City, whose chief director at the time was Ingmar Bergen, whose films he also directed. In 1957, he starred in a small part in Bergman’s Prison City, which was the first film directed by the director. In 1958, he played the lead role in a Bergman film, In Magician, who had previously sought to play the director himself. In 1959, he was cast in a role in The Sixth Sense. In 1961, he made his screen debuts in Alf Sjöberg’s films Only a Mother and Miss Julie.
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This page is based on the article Max von Sydow published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 15, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
