I originally quit doing these types of memorials in 2016, when the sheer number of them devastated me. But I feel that this occasion justifies a return to the medium.
Carl Adolf "Max" Von Sydow, one of the greatest international acting talents of the 20th Century, has died on Sunday, March 8th, 2020 at the age of 90.
Like other late luminaries of his profession--Sir Christopher Lee, Kirk Douglas--it's difficult to speak with any concision about how exactly Von Sydow entered our cultural consciousness because he was everywhere all the time. I myself can't imagine a time when he wasn't around.
Born in Lund, Sweden on April 10, 1929 to an ethnology professor father and schoolteacher mother (as well as an actual baroness), Von Sydow seemed to have acting in his blood, as he formed his own small acting company at Lund Cathedral School after seeing a production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." He acquired the name "Max" by borrowing it from a star performer of a flea circus he once saw during his 2-year stint in the Swedish Army Quartermaster Corps. After being discharged, he trained at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm from 1948 to 1951 and made his debut in a disastrous production of "Egmont." But over 11 performances in other plays as well as 2 early film appearances (Only A Mother, 1948 and Miss Julie, 1951) destroyed this ignominious debut, and he eventually won the 1954 Royal Foundation of Sweden's Cultural Award. In 1949, he moved to Malmo, Sweden, and joined the Malmo City Theatre, whose chief director was another young promising artist in his field.
His name was Ingmar Bergman. And it was here that both men's illustrious history began with the first of what would be 11 feature-length films that cemented the 2 men among other immortal actor-director duos such as Herzog-Kinski, Scorsese-DeNiro, and Hitchcock-Hedrin.
The film was The Seventh Seal (1957).
Von Sydow (right) as Antonious Block challenges Death (Bengt Ekerot) to a chess match for his life in The Seventh Seal.
At the age of 26, Von Sydow convincingly played a considerably older Knight of the Crusades, returning home to a plague-stricken Sweden and encountering numerous friends and foes on his journey back to his wife. But from the film's legendary opening, he is stalked by a mischievous and relentless Grim Reaper, and in order to escape his fate, the crafty knight challenges Death to a literal life-or-death game of chess. The game would serve as the default image associated with the film, and has become one of the most indelible images in the history of the art form. In fact, challenging Death to a board game contest for the freedom to live has become cemented into modern culture. While well-received upon its release, the film was rediscovered and revitalized in the 1970s by the burgeoning film student culture emerging in the US and Europe, and this proliferation led to a wider exposure.
It is now considered one of the greatest films of all time.
He would go on to resume work exclusively in Sweden despite his increasing roster of critically acclaimed Bergman collaborations--namely the equally legendary Wild Strawberries (1957) and the eviscerating revenge drama The Virgin Spring (1960) (which would later inspire its more notorious adaptation The Last House on the Left (1971))--turning down constant offers for English-language films such as Dr. No and The Sound of Music, but he eventually capitulated by accepting the role of Jesus Christ in George Stevens' The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) and a Christian missionary in Hawaii (1966). For the former, the already-fluent-in-English Von Sydow spent 6 months at the University of California in Los Angeles perfecting a Mid-Atlantic accent.
Both films underperformed, but they solidified Von Sydow's visage in the public eye, and his regal European demeanor made him a shoo-in for a number of elegant villain roles, which he accepted with some reluctance, such as the mild-mannered assassin in The Three Days of the Condor (1975).
But this was balanced by his large run of successful films playing decent-to-exemplary characters in films such as The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972), Jan Troell's epic diptych about Swedish immigrants in 19th-century America. And it was one of these searing, gravitas-laden performances of decent men under crushing odds that catapulted him perhaps into mortality.
That film was The Exorcist (1973).
Playing the elderly, kindly, but disciplined Father Lankester Merrin, returning to do battle with Pazuzu, the Sumerian demon he vanquished in his youth, Von Sydow's confident and mannered performances helped him stand out above Dick Smith's equally famous special effects. The Exorcist became one of the biggest box office hits of all-time, and also became immortal in the pop culture, breaking the mold of the genre and leaving its imprimatur permanently ingrained in the subject for all time.
From here on out, whether big or small the role, Von Sydow was here to stay. He spent the remainder of the decade in forays in American theater, as well as smaller European films of mixed success. He had a falling out with Bergman after declining a part in one of his films, and the 2 did not work together again until 1991 with Bille August's adaptation of Bergman's script Best Intentions, a semi-biographical film about Bergman's parents. But between that, Von Sydow was successfully courted by the creative powers of an even bigger cultural behemoth than 1950s European art cinema or the 1970s Blockbuster:
The Eighties.
And it was here that Von Sydow cemented himself into entire generations of young fans with outstandingly colorful performances in a wide variety of visually colorful and influential genre films, beginning with Ming the Merciless in the infamous 1980 adaptation of Flash Gordon.
This followed with King Osric in Conan The Barbarian (1982)
And, for a countless number of us Generation Xers, Generation Yers, and Millennials, we were introduced to the great Von Sydow when he sunk his teeth into the great parody of movie villain roles he was courted for in Brewmeister Smith, in the one and only 1983 Bob & Doug McKenzie movie Strange Brew.
"I could crush your head...like a NUT! But I won't....because I need you!"
He also worked with David Lynch as Planetologist Pardot Kynes in the ill-fated box-office flop Dune (1984), which has also seen a resurgence in popularity courtesy of the VHS Generation (to which I proudly belong).
But despite this planted-seed popularity, he never lost sight of his status and responsibilities as international thespian, and continued to resume his role as dramatic anchor in a number of serious dramas throughout the 1980s. Most notably award-winning turns in 2 wildly divergent projects: Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Bille August's Pelle the Conqueror (1987). He seized the momentum to make his only directorial effort, 1988's Katinka.
He maintained this back-and-forth momentum through the 1990s, appearing in dramas like Awakenings and Snow Falling on Cedars (1999) to popcorn fare such as Needful Things (1993) and Judge Dredd (1995). Oftentimes, he was one of the main reasons to see a number of these films despite appearing in them for less than one-third of the entire run.
Playing both Jesus and The Devil isn't a double-bill most actors can claim. (Needful Things, 1993)
By this time, Von Sydow had become a secret weapon of filmmakers: an immediate trump card that left an impression in any film, and even established directors chomped at the bit to use him. Steven Spielberg cast him in Minority Report in 2002, Brett Rattner cast him in Rush Hour 3 (2007) as a suave French villain, Julien Schnabel cast him in The Diving Bell & The Butterfly in 2007, and he also dipped into television as The Second Golden Age started up with "The Ring of the Niebelungenlied" in 2004 and later on in "The Tudors." In 2010, he hit the sinister character button again with a role in Scorsese's Shutter Island.
Oh, and he also later appeared on a teeny, tiny, leetle show you might have heard of called "Game of Thrones" as The Three-Eyed Raven.
If that wasn't bad-ass enough to get a stint as a drop-in-and-destroy-it role on the biggest TV show of the entire decade, he got an Oscar nomination for his role in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011), a movie that was otherwise universally panned.
You know you've reached GOAT status when you get nominated without any lines.
And...not to be outdone, in 2015, J.J. Abrams gave the world what it needed. No, not a good Star Wars movie, just a Star Wars movie with Max Von Sydow in it. It was a small role that nevertheless excited audiences, however briefly, that Star Wars just got a major dose of class and awesome. It didn't, because he's only in the movie for 5 minutes. Still, if you need a reason to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens, you can find many worse reasons than him.
His character's name is Lor San Tekka. I had to look it up, too.
Perhaps sensing his crime of only having Von Sydow in a movie for 5 minutes, Abrams invited him back to reprise his character in the Lego Stars Wars: The Force Awakens video game in 2016. This was becoming familiar ground to Von Sydow, who also lent his voice to Skyrim, The Ghostbusters Video Game (2017) and by this time, "The Simpsons" as well.
The resemblance is off, but is fine.
His final film was Nicholas Dimitropoulos war drama Echoes of the Past (2019) which is currently in post-production.
Von Sydow was twice married, first to Christina Inga Britta Olin from 1951 to 1979, and then to Catherine Brelet in 1997. In 2002, he became a French citizen, which required the forfeiture of his Swedish citizenship. He was at his home in Provence, France when he died on Sunday.
And all this is just a summation of the man's life. His filmography alone is worthy of at least a trilogy of phone-book sized times in glamorous slipcases. His life is better suited for a scribe wiser and more skillful than myself to render. I just do what I can because my appreciation for Mr. Von Sydow eclipses my flaws as a writer.
It should be noted that the announcement of his death was slow to catch on and spread to the US press, with the announcement largely not showing up until late Monday afternoon or evening the next day. I myself didn't find out until Tuesday morning around midnight.
I suppose it was a given that the news would prompt viral re-posts of the all-too-mortal Von Sydow in his immortal image of finally losing to Death in the chess game of life, but I'm too saddened to indulge in such temptations, understandable though they may be. His passing has hit this old film geek very hard, and with it sapped any levity I can find to ease the pain of his passing. The mournful, maudlin truth is that a great artist and great actor who has given his lifetime and craft to entertain us and give the world a nourishing art, is no longer with us, and the gap left behind him will now be a lingering void reminding us (or at least me) at how much more diminished we are without him.
Farewell, Mr. Von Sydow. I thank you for all you have done, and grieve for all you still had left to give us.
Carl Adolf "Max" Von Sydow, one of the greatest international acting talents of the 20th Century, has died on Sunday, March 8th, 2020 at the age of 90.
Like other late luminaries of his profession--Sir Christopher Lee, Kirk Douglas--it's difficult to speak with any concision about how exactly Von Sydow entered our cultural consciousness because he was everywhere all the time. I myself can't imagine a time when he wasn't around.
Born in Lund, Sweden on April 10, 1929 to an ethnology professor father and schoolteacher mother (as well as an actual baroness), Von Sydow seemed to have acting in his blood, as he formed his own small acting company at Lund Cathedral School after seeing a production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." He acquired the name "Max" by borrowing it from a star performer of a flea circus he once saw during his 2-year stint in the Swedish Army Quartermaster Corps. After being discharged, he trained at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm from 1948 to 1951 and made his debut in a disastrous production of "Egmont." But over 11 performances in other plays as well as 2 early film appearances (Only A Mother, 1948 and Miss Julie, 1951) destroyed this ignominious debut, and he eventually won the 1954 Royal Foundation of Sweden's Cultural Award. In 1949, he moved to Malmo, Sweden, and joined the Malmo City Theatre, whose chief director was another young promising artist in his field.
His name was Ingmar Bergman. And it was here that both men's illustrious history began with the first of what would be 11 feature-length films that cemented the 2 men among other immortal actor-director duos such as Herzog-Kinski, Scorsese-DeNiro, and Hitchcock-Hedrin.
The film was The Seventh Seal (1957).
Von Sydow (right) as Antonious Block challenges Death (Bengt Ekerot) to a chess match for his life in The Seventh Seal.
At the age of 26, Von Sydow convincingly played a considerably older Knight of the Crusades, returning home to a plague-stricken Sweden and encountering numerous friends and foes on his journey back to his wife. But from the film's legendary opening, he is stalked by a mischievous and relentless Grim Reaper, and in order to escape his fate, the crafty knight challenges Death to a literal life-or-death game of chess. The game would serve as the default image associated with the film, and has become one of the most indelible images in the history of the art form. In fact, challenging Death to a board game contest for the freedom to live has become cemented into modern culture. While well-received upon its release, the film was rediscovered and revitalized in the 1970s by the burgeoning film student culture emerging in the US and Europe, and this proliferation led to a wider exposure.
It is now considered one of the greatest films of all time.
He would go on to resume work exclusively in Sweden despite his increasing roster of critically acclaimed Bergman collaborations--namely the equally legendary Wild Strawberries (1957) and the eviscerating revenge drama The Virgin Spring (1960) (which would later inspire its more notorious adaptation The Last House on the Left (1971))--turning down constant offers for English-language films such as Dr. No and The Sound of Music, but he eventually capitulated by accepting the role of Jesus Christ in George Stevens' The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) and a Christian missionary in Hawaii (1966). For the former, the already-fluent-in-English Von Sydow spent 6 months at the University of California in Los Angeles perfecting a Mid-Atlantic accent.
Both films underperformed, but they solidified Von Sydow's visage in the public eye, and his regal European demeanor made him a shoo-in for a number of elegant villain roles, which he accepted with some reluctance, such as the mild-mannered assassin in The Three Days of the Condor (1975).
But this was balanced by his large run of successful films playing decent-to-exemplary characters in films such as The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972), Jan Troell's epic diptych about Swedish immigrants in 19th-century America. And it was one of these searing, gravitas-laden performances of decent men under crushing odds that catapulted him perhaps into mortality.
That film was The Exorcist (1973).
Playing the elderly, kindly, but disciplined Father Lankester Merrin, returning to do battle with Pazuzu, the Sumerian demon he vanquished in his youth, Von Sydow's confident and mannered performances helped him stand out above Dick Smith's equally famous special effects. The Exorcist became one of the biggest box office hits of all-time, and also became immortal in the pop culture, breaking the mold of the genre and leaving its imprimatur permanently ingrained in the subject for all time.
From here on out, whether big or small the role, Von Sydow was here to stay. He spent the remainder of the decade in forays in American theater, as well as smaller European films of mixed success. He had a falling out with Bergman after declining a part in one of his films, and the 2 did not work together again until 1991 with Bille August's adaptation of Bergman's script Best Intentions, a semi-biographical film about Bergman's parents. But between that, Von Sydow was successfully courted by the creative powers of an even bigger cultural behemoth than 1950s European art cinema or the 1970s Blockbuster:
The Eighties.
And it was here that Von Sydow cemented himself into entire generations of young fans with outstandingly colorful performances in a wide variety of visually colorful and influential genre films, beginning with Ming the Merciless in the infamous 1980 adaptation of Flash Gordon.
This followed with King Osric in Conan The Barbarian (1982)
And, for a countless number of us Generation Xers, Generation Yers, and Millennials, we were introduced to the great Von Sydow when he sunk his teeth into the great parody of movie villain roles he was courted for in Brewmeister Smith, in the one and only 1983 Bob & Doug McKenzie movie Strange Brew.
"I could crush your head...like a NUT! But I won't....because I need you!"
He also worked with David Lynch as Planetologist Pardot Kynes in the ill-fated box-office flop Dune (1984), which has also seen a resurgence in popularity courtesy of the VHS Generation (to which I proudly belong).
But despite this planted-seed popularity, he never lost sight of his status and responsibilities as international thespian, and continued to resume his role as dramatic anchor in a number of serious dramas throughout the 1980s. Most notably award-winning turns in 2 wildly divergent projects: Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Bille August's Pelle the Conqueror (1987). He seized the momentum to make his only directorial effort, 1988's Katinka.
He maintained this back-and-forth momentum through the 1990s, appearing in dramas like Awakenings and Snow Falling on Cedars (1999) to popcorn fare such as Needful Things (1993) and Judge Dredd (1995). Oftentimes, he was one of the main reasons to see a number of these films despite appearing in them for less than one-third of the entire run.
Playing both Jesus and The Devil isn't a double-bill most actors can claim. (Needful Things, 1993)
By this time, Von Sydow had become a secret weapon of filmmakers: an immediate trump card that left an impression in any film, and even established directors chomped at the bit to use him. Steven Spielberg cast him in Minority Report in 2002, Brett Rattner cast him in Rush Hour 3 (2007) as a suave French villain, Julien Schnabel cast him in The Diving Bell & The Butterfly in 2007, and he also dipped into television as The Second Golden Age started up with "The Ring of the Niebelungenlied" in 2004 and later on in "The Tudors." In 2010, he hit the sinister character button again with a role in Scorsese's Shutter Island.
Oh, and he also later appeared on a teeny, tiny, leetle show you might have heard of called "Game of Thrones" as The Three-Eyed Raven.
If that wasn't bad-ass enough to get a stint as a drop-in-and-destroy-it role on the biggest TV show of the entire decade, he got an Oscar nomination for his role in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011), a movie that was otherwise universally panned.
You know you've reached GOAT status when you get nominated without any lines.
And...not to be outdone, in 2015, J.J. Abrams gave the world what it needed. No, not a good Star Wars movie, just a Star Wars movie with Max Von Sydow in it. It was a small role that nevertheless excited audiences, however briefly, that Star Wars just got a major dose of class and awesome. It didn't, because he's only in the movie for 5 minutes. Still, if you need a reason to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens, you can find many worse reasons than him.
His character's name is Lor San Tekka. I had to look it up, too.
Perhaps sensing his crime of only having Von Sydow in a movie for 5 minutes, Abrams invited him back to reprise his character in the Lego Stars Wars: The Force Awakens video game in 2016. This was becoming familiar ground to Von Sydow, who also lent his voice to Skyrim, The Ghostbusters Video Game (2017) and by this time, "The Simpsons" as well.
The resemblance is off, but is fine.
His final film was Nicholas Dimitropoulos war drama Echoes of the Past (2019) which is currently in post-production.
Von Sydow was twice married, first to Christina Inga Britta Olin from 1951 to 1979, and then to Catherine Brelet in 1997. In 2002, he became a French citizen, which required the forfeiture of his Swedish citizenship. He was at his home in Provence, France when he died on Sunday.
And all this is just a summation of the man's life. His filmography alone is worthy of at least a trilogy of phone-book sized times in glamorous slipcases. His life is better suited for a scribe wiser and more skillful than myself to render. I just do what I can because my appreciation for Mr. Von Sydow eclipses my flaws as a writer.
It should be noted that the announcement of his death was slow to catch on and spread to the US press, with the announcement largely not showing up until late Monday afternoon or evening the next day. I myself didn't find out until Tuesday morning around midnight.
I suppose it was a given that the news would prompt viral re-posts of the all-too-mortal Von Sydow in his immortal image of finally losing to Death in the chess game of life, but I'm too saddened to indulge in such temptations, understandable though they may be. His passing has hit this old film geek very hard, and with it sapped any levity I can find to ease the pain of his passing. The mournful, maudlin truth is that a great artist and great actor who has given his lifetime and craft to entertain us and give the world a nourishing art, is no longer with us, and the gap left behind him will now be a lingering void reminding us (or at least me) at how much more diminished we are without him.
Farewell, Mr. Von Sydow. I thank you for all you have done, and grieve for all you still had left to give us.
