![]() ![]() We were free - he hadn’t yet become world famous and I was just a regular stage actor with a few film roles to my credit. “We did most of that work when we were much younger. “I can’t say exactly what influence he’s had on me, but it must be enormous,” he said of Bergman. In addition to “The Seventh Seal,” he would star in 10 other Bergman films, including “The Magician,” “The Virgin Spring” and “Wild Strawberries,” and develop a close relationship with Sweden’s most famous moviemaker. It was during this period he first met Bergman. “I think I owe very much to those years.” Actor Max von Sydow, whose career stretched across seven decades, died Sunday at the age of 90. ![]() “I’m very grateful to the schooling I had in Sweden because in order to learn acting you have to work, work, work,” he said. He studied at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm and acted in small municipality theaters in Sweden for eight years - an experience he later described as crucial for his career. He decided he wanted to be an actor and formed a theater society with his friends after seeing his first play, William Shakespeare’s ”A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” at age 14. His given name, he said, was “not a good name” after World War II.Īlthough his family was not interested in theater, he said his father was a master of telling adventure stories that fueled his imagination as a child. He was baptized Carl Adolf von Sydow, but later changed his first name to Max. Von Sydow was born April 10, 1929, into a family of academics in the southern Swedish city of Lund. “I think that for many years I used my profession as some kind of a mental therapy.” Now I could do it with the character as a shield, as a defense, and as an excuse. I was allowed to express all kinds of strange things that I never dared to express before. ![]() “When I started acting in an amateur group in high school, although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I suddenly got a tool in my hand that was wonderful. “I was a very shy boy when I was a kid,” he said in an Associated Press interview. While his characters were often sinister, tormented or evil, the soft-spoken von Sydow said he became an actor to overcome his own shyness. In 2015, he appeared briefly in the blockbuster “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” He also played a tormented painter in Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters” and portrayed the devil in “Needful Things,” a 1991 horror film based on a novel by Stephen King. No in the first James Bond film with the same name, but later appeared as the cat-stroking villain Ernst Blofeld in the 1983 “Never Say Never Again,” starring Sean Connery as Bond. In 1980, von Sydow starred as the evil emperor Ming the Merciless in “Flash Gordon.” He turned down the role as the sinister Dr. It is very boring to be stuck in more or less one type of character,” he once said in an interview. “What I as an actor look for is a variety of parts. ![]()
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