Here, he played Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest and took the lead in Luigi Pirandello's Henry IV, en route to receiving a prestigious bursary via the Royal Foundation of Sweden's Cultural Award. He appeared in nine plays over the next two years, including Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt, before moving on to the City Theatre in Hälsingborg. In 1951, he was striving to establish himself with the Norrköping-Linköping Municipal Theatre. Among his classmates was Ingrid Thulin and, over the next three years, Von Sydow developed the technique that would underpin his screen craft.įollowing his stage bow in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Egmont, he made two films with acclaimed director Alf Sjöberg, Only a Mother (1949), a sombre drama about farm labourers, and August Strindberg's Miss Julie (1951), in which he played a stablehand. Indeed, he adopted the name 'Max' in honour of the star of a flea circus prior to enrolling at the Royal Academy drama school in Stockholm in 1948.
Having formed a drama club with some friends, Von Sydow continued to be fascinated by the performing arts during a two-year stint in the Army Quartermaster Corps.
Despite being raised a Lutheran, Von Sydow (whose surname is actually pronounced 'Suedorff') attended the Roman Catholic Lund Cathedral School and was heading towards a career in the law when he was bitten by the acting bug during a school trip to a Malmö production of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. His father, Carl Wilhelm, was an ethnologist and professor of folklore at the local university, while his mother, Baroness Maria Margareta von Rappe, was a teacher of Pomeranian ancestry. It's Pronounced 'Suedorff'Ĭarl Adolf von Sydow was born on 10 April 1929 in the southern Swedish city of Lund. Now, sadly, Max von Sydow has left the stage and gone to fulfil the words he spoke in his indelible debut lead: 'Now, I live in a ghost world, enclosed in my dreams and imaginings.' But what dreams and imaginings they were. In playing the latter, he prompted John Wayne in an epically miscast cameo as a Roman centurion to drawl, 'Truly, this man was the son of God!' Yet, three decades later, he found himself playing Satan before going on to voice Zeus in the Swedish dub of the classic Disney animation, Hercules (1997). He beat Death at chess and vanquished a malevolent spirit with the compelling power of Christ.
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But Von Sydow had many strings to his bow, as Cinema Paradiso reveals in reflecting upon a career full of surprises. To many, Max von Sydow will always be associated with the austere films of his fellow Swede, Ingmar Bergman. On 8 March 2020, the screen lost one of its most imposing presences.
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