52 Facts About Max Von Sydow

Max Von Sydow had a 70-year career in European and American cinema, television, and theatre, appearing in more than 150 films and several television series in multiple languages.

Max Von Sydow became a French citizen in 2002 and lived in France for the last two decades of his life.

Max Von Sydow appeared in a total of eleven 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.

Max Von Sydow had a supporting role in HBO's Game of Thrones as the Three-eyed Raven, for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination.

Max Von Sydow received the Royal Foundation of Sweden's Cultural Award in 1954, was made a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in 2005, and was named a Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur on 17 October 2012.

Related searches

Carl Adolf von Sydow was born on 10 April 1929 in Lund, Sweden.

Max Von Sydow's father, Carl Wilhelm von Sydow, was an ethnologist and professor of folkloristics at Lund University.

Max Von Sydow's mother, Baroness Maria Margareta Rappe, was a schoolteacher.

Von Sydow was raised as a Lutheran, but became an agnostic in the 1970s.

Von Sydow attended Lund Cathedral School, where he learned English at an early age.

Von Sydow served for two years in the Swedish Army with the Army Quartermaster Corps, where he adopted the name "Max" from the star performer of a flea circus he saw.

Max Von Sydow made his stage debut in a small part in the Goethe play Egmont, which he considered "almost a disaster, " but received good reviews for his performance.

In 1951, von Sydow joined the Norrkoping-Linkoping Municipal Theatre, appearing in nine plays including Peer Gynt.

In 1955, von Sydow moved to Malmo and joined the Malmo City Theatre, whose chief director at the time was Ingmar Bergman.

Von Sydow had previously sought to play a small part in Bergman's Prison, but the director rejected the proposition.

Bergman and von Sydow's first film was The Seventh Seal, in which von Sydow portrayed Antonius Block, a disillusioned 14th-century knight returning from the Crusades to a plague-stricken Sweden.

Films starring von Sydow were submitted by Sweden for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in five out of six years between 1957 and 1962.

Under Bergman, von Sydow continued his stage career, playing Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Peer in Peer Gynt, Alceste in The Misanthrope and Faust in Urfaust.

Max Von Sydow was first approached at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival to act in US films, but refused the proposition, saying that he was "content in Sweden" and "had no intention of starting an international career".

Max Von Sydow refused the opportunity to play the titular role for Dr No and Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music.

In 1965, von Sydow finally accepted George Stevens's offer and made his international debut, playing Christ in the epic The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Max Von Sydow accepted the part against the advice of Bergman, spent six months at the University of California, Los Angeles, preparing for the role, and adopted a Mid-Atlantic accent.

Max Von Sydow went on to play a crop-dusting pilot in The Reward and a fanatic missionary in Hawaii.

In 1968's Hour of the Wolf, von Sydow played an artist living on an isolated island with his pregnant wife, played by Ullmann.

In 1971 and 1972, von Sydow again starred alongside Ullmann in the Jan Troell epic duology, The Emigrants The New Land, the story of a Swedish peasant family that emigrates to America in the mid-19th century.

Related searches

In 1971, von Sydow starred in The Touch, Bergman's first English-language film, playing a doctor whose wife is having an affair.

In 1973, von Sydow appeared in one of his most commercially successful films, William Friedkin's The Exorcist.

Max Von Sydow played Father Lankester Merrin, the film's titular Jesuit priest, which earned him his second Golden Globe nomination.

Max Von Sydow reprised the role in the film's sequel, Exorcist II: The Heretic.

In 1977, von Sydow made his Broadway debut alongside Eileen Atkins and Bibi Andersson in Per Olov Enquist's The Night of the Tribades, a play about the writer August Strindberg.

Von Sydow made his British stage debut at The Old Vic in 1988 as Prospero in The Tempest, a role he first played in Sweden three decades ago.

In 1985, von Sydow was a member of the jury at the 35th Berlin International Film Festival.

In 1988, von Sydow made his only directorial foray with Katinka, a film based on the Herman Bang novel, Ved Vejen.

In 1989, von Sydow appeared in the television film Red King, White Knight, for which he received his first Primetime Emmy Award nomination.

Max Von Sydow supplied the voice for Vigo the Carpathian in the 1989 film, Ghostbusters II.

In 1996, von Sydow made his final appearance in a Bergman film, Private Confessions, directed by Liv Ullmann and written by Bergman.

In 1997, von Sydow played Nobel Prize-winning Norwegian novelist and Nazi sympathizer Knut Hamsun in the biopic Hamsun.

In 2002, von Sydow acted in one of his biggest commercial successes, playing the PreCrime director opposite Tom Cruise in Steven Spielberg's science fiction thriller Minority Report.

In 2004, von Sydow appeared in a television adaptation of the Ring of the Nibelung saga.

In 2010, von Sydow played a sinister German doctor in Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, and Robin Hood's blind stepfather Sir Walter Loxley in Ridley Scott's Robin Hood.

In March 2014, Von Sydow provided the voice of an art forger named in The War of Art episode of The Simpsons.

Max Von Sydow voiced Esbern, a mentor of the protagonist in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and narrated the game's debut trailer.

Max Von Sydow lent his voice to the 2009 game Ghostbusters: The Video Game and reprised his role as Lor San Tekka in Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

In 2018, von Sydow appeared in Thomas Vinterberg's film Kursk, known as The Command, based on the true story of the Kursk submarine disaster.

Max Von Sydow portrayed Nicolas Andreou, one of the last living survivors of the Kalavryta massacre of 1943 committed by Nazi troops during the Axis occupation of Greece.

Related searches

Von Sydow married actress Christina Inga Britta Olin in 1951.

Von Sydow married French documentarian Catherine Brelet in 1997 and adopted Brelet's two adult sons, Cedric and Yvan, from her previous marriage.

Von Sydow relocated to Paris following his marriage to Brelet.

Von Sydow was reported to be either an agnostic or an atheist.

Von Sydow died on 8 March 2020 at his home in Provence, France at age 90.

At the age of 82, von Sydow was one of the oldest nominees for an Academy Award.

Max Von Sydow is the winner of 3 Guldbagge Awards and received a festival trophy from the Cannes Film Festival in 2004.