On 8 March 2020, the screen lost one of its most imposing presences. To many, Max von Sydow will always be associated with the austere films of his fellow Swede, Ingmar Bergman. But Von Sydow had many strings to his bow, as Cinema Paradiso reveals in reflecting upon a career full of surprises.
He beat Death at chess and vanquished a malevolent spirit with the compelling power of Christ. 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). 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.
It's Pronounced 'Suedorff'
Carl Adolf von Sydow was born on 10 April 1929 in the southern Swedish city of Lund. 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. 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 .
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. 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. Among his classmates was Ingrid Thulin and, over the next three years, Von Sydow developed the technique that would underpin his screen craft.
Following 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.
In 1951, he was striving to establish himself with the Norrköping-Linköping Municipal Theatre. 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. 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. Buoyed by the prize, Von Sydow made the career-changing decision to join the Malmö City Theatre, whose principal director was Ingmar Bergman.
The Bergman Connection
In 1949, Bergman had opted not to cast Von Sydow as a policeman in his experimental film within a film, Prison. But he soon came to appreciate the young actor's range, as he saw him hold his own against such established members of his stage and screen ensemble as Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Björnstrand, Bibi Andersson and Gunnel Lindblom in taking on such contrasting roles as Brick in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Alceste in Molière's The Misanthrope and the title role in Goethe's Faust. Consequently, Bergman found room for Von Sydow in the stage version of a morality play entitled, Wood Painting, that he had previously produced on the radio.
When he decided to expand and film the scenario, Bergman offered Von Sydow the role of a clown in a band of travelling players. But he convinced the director to entrust him with the pivotal role of 14th-century knight, Antonius Bloch, whose return to Sweden from the Crusades provides the impetus for The Seventh Seal (1957). Discovering that plague has stricken his homeland, Bloch seeks to save himself and the troupe by challenging Death (Bengt Ekerot) to a game of chess on the rocky beach.
Chiming in with the uncertainties of the Cold War world, the film was widely acclaimed and made Von Sydow a star in his homeland. However, Bergman was accustomed to sharing out principal parts among his players and Von Sydow had to settle for supporting roles in his next two pictures. He played a petrol pump attendant filling the car of Professor Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström) in Wild Strawberries and an expectant father in So Close to Life (both 1958), which saw Eva Dahlbeck, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson and Barbro Hiort af Ornäs share the Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival for their touching depictions of women waiting to become mothers.
However, Von Sydow was very much to the fore again in The Magician (1958), in which he excels as Albert Emmanuel Vogler, the heavily disguised 19th-century mesmerist whose integrity is questioned by sceptical Stockholm scientist, Dr Vergerus (Gunnar Bjornstrand). Essentially playing Bergman's alter ego in a dissertation on the pressures of creativity and the nature of illusion, the 6ft 4in Von Sydow has relatively few lines. But he uses his eyes and chiselled features to create a sense of malevolent wit and brooding sensuality that contrasts starkly with the simple faith and vengeful fury that he demonstrates in The Virgin Spring (1960), as medieval peasant Christian Per Töre, who vows to build a church despite having had his belief in God severely shaken by his rape and murder of his innocent daughter.
Although he was lauded by the critics, Von Sydow once again had to return to the ranks for Through a Glass Darkly (1961), in which he plays Martin, a respected doctor whose inability to help his schizophrenic wife, Karin (Harriet Andersson), impacts upon her detached novelist father, David (Gunnar Bjornstrand), and her disturbingly devoted brother, Minus, (Lars Passgard). This harrowing drama followed its predecessor in winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and, following The Silence, Bergman completed his 'crisis of faith' trilogy with Winter Light (1963), which cast Von Sydow as fisherman Jonas Persson, whose dread at China developing an atom bomb impacts upon his pregnant wife, Karin (Gunnel Lindblom), disenchanted village pastor Tomas Ericsson (Gunnar Björnstrand) and the latter's schoolteacher ex-lover, Märta Lundberg (Ingrid Thulin).
Von Sydow relished the challenge of playing a depressive with an inferiority complex. He also agreed to return to the stage as Quentin in Bergman's 1965 Royal Dramatic Theatre production of Arthur Miller's After the Fall. But the lure of Hollywood would remove him from Sweden over the next few years and it took three exceptional Bergman treatises on a troubled world to coax him back.
Pairing him with Liv Ullmann for the first time, Hour of the Wolf cast Von Sydow as Johan Borg, an artist living on the remote island of Baltrum with his wife, Alma, whose dreams and drawings begin to betray his growing detachment from reality. Merging cues from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, ETA Hoffman and the visions that had tormented Bergman after he relocated to Fårö, this troubling tale was followed by the even more sobering Shame (both 1968), which sees Von Sydow and Ullmann play married musicians, Jan and Eva Rosenberg, whose relationship begins to unravel after the reclusive Jan is radically politicised during a civil war.
This punishing triptych was completed by The Passion of Anna (1969), which charts the fraught relationships between the recently divorced Andreas Winkelman (Von Sydow), grieving widow Anna Fromm (Ullmann) and photographer Elis Vergerus (Erland Josephson) and his wife, Eva (Bibi Andersson), against the backdrop of a spate of pitilessly cruel attacks on animals. For once, however, Bergman's work was outshone by that of compatriot Jan Troell, whose masterly duology, The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972), is based on a novel cycle by Vilhelm Moburg and follows Swedish peasants Karl Oskar Nilsson (Von Sydow) and his wife, Kristina (Ullmann), from the southern province of Småland to the Minnesota of the 1840s, where their struggle to farm the implacable land nearly breaks them both.
By this time, Von Sydow was himself spending longer periods in America and his facility for speaking English led to a reunion with Bergman on his first non-Swedish feature, The Touch (1971), a variation on Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary that sees Dr Andreas Vergerus being cuckolded by his neglected wife, Karin (Bibi Andersson), and David (Elliott Gould), an archaeologist engaged in tracing the history of a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary that has been hidden in the local church since the Middle Ages.
At the time, nobody could have foreseen that this underrated saga would be the last time that Bergman directed Von Sydow. But, while he was grateful to his mentor for the opportunities he had given him during their 11-film collaboration, Von Sydow later admitted to finding it increasingly difficult to work with Bergman. He did create the role of the abusive bishop in Fanny and Alexander (1982) with the actor in mind. But Von Sydow's agent demanded an exorbitant fee and he bitterly regretted losing the part to the impressive Jan Malmsjö.
There was a reunion of sorts, however, as Bergman wrote Bille August's The Best Intentions (1992), which was inspired by the romance between his parents, Lutheran pastor Henrik Bergman (Samuel Froler) and the wealthy Anna Åkerblom (Pernilla August), whose parents, Johan (Von Sydow) and Karin (Ghita Nørby), thoroughly disapprove of the union. Moreover, Von Sydow would also feature in Liv Ullmann's Bergman-scripted teleplay, Private Confessions (1996), which formed a loose trilogy with August's film and son Daniel Bergman's Sunday's Children (1992).
Hollywood Calls
Von Sydow was first approached by the Hollywood studios at Cannes in 1959. On Bergman's advice, however, he turned down the title role opposite Sean Connery's James Bond in Terence Young's Dr No (1962) and the part of Captain Von Trapp, alongside Julie Andrews in Robert Wise's adaptation of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's The Sound of Music (1965). It's tempting to speculate how the Swede might have tackled 'Edelweis', but Von Sydow was probably right to let Christopher Plummer step into the breach. However, he couldn't refuse the offer to play Jesus Christ in George Stevens's The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) and spent six months perfecting a Mid-Atlantic accent at the University of California in Los Angeles.
Von Sydow would later describe the project as like 'being in prison', as he had to maintain a messianic persona off-screen in case the gossip columnists unearthed anything that could jeopardise the sanctity of the finished picture. 'It was the hardest part I've ever had to play,' he told one interviewer. But, while conventional wisdom has it that Von Sydow was less effective than Jeffrey Hunter in Nicholas Ray's King of Kings (1961), his Christ has an authority and compassion that remains potent and poignant 55 years on.
Von Sydow finally got to team with Julie Andrews on Hawaii (1966), George Roy Hill's version of a James Michener novel about a Calvinist whose arrogance and lack of empathy undermine his efforts to bring Christianity to Maui in the 1820s. Von Sydow earned a Golden Globe nomination for his intense performance, which remained a personal favourite, as he got to act alongside Clas and Henrik, his sons with first wife Christina Olin.
The same year saw Von Sydow play his first overt villain, Oktober, the leader of a band of neo-Nazis responsible for the murder of two British agents in Berlin in Michael Anderson's The Quiller Memorandum (1966), which was adapted from a pulp thriller by Elleston Trevor. When he returned to Hollywood after his late-60s reunion with Bergman, Von Sydow found himself on the other side of the ideological divide as Soviet colonel Kosnov in John Huston's Cold War caper, The Kremlin Letter (1970), which reunited him with Bibi Andersson.
While acknowledging that such assignments paid the bills and maintained his profile, Von Sydow derived little pleasure from playing baddies. He was more intrigued by roles like Salem in László Benedek's The Night Visitor (1971), which once again paired him with Liv Ullmann in a tale of seething revenge that sees an inmate at a high-security asylum escape his confines and cross the wintry wastes in only his shorts in order to pay back the family members who had committed him. Heavily reliant on an unnamed stunt double, Von Sydow inherited the role from Christopher Lee and he next ventured into the British actor's trademark horror territory to play Father Lankester Merrin in William Friedkin's adaptation of William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (1973), which required him to age three decades to play the Jesuit summoned to drive out the vicious demon that has possessed 12 year-old Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair).
Having received a second Golden Globe nomination, Von Sydow would return to play the younger Fr Merrin in John Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). But the sequel proved disappointing and he was seen to much better advantage as Harry Haller in Fred Haines's undervalued adaptation of Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf (1974), as the ruthless assassin Joubert stalking Robert Redford in Sydney Pollack's gripping paranoia thriller, Three Days of the Condor, and as The Baron in Robert Clouse's The Ultimate Warrior (both 1975), an overlooked science-fiction drama set in 2012 that has seen the global population decimated by climate change and pestilence. Von Sydow heads a self-contained commune in New York but is eager for pugnacious newcomer Yul Brynner to take his daughter to a new colony formed on an island off the North Carolina coast.
In 1977, Von Sydow made his Broadway debut in The Night of the Tribades, a play about August Strindberg, whom he would also play opposite Donald Sutherland in Henning Carlsen's Paul Gauguin biopic, The Wolf At the Door (1986). He would revisit another stage role, Dr Louis Feldman, in Andrei Konchalovsky's Duet For One (1986), which fictionalised the story of cellist Jacqueline du Pré that Anand Tucker. Von Sydow would also make his West End bow in Jonathan Miller's interpretation of The Tempest (1988), although he never got to play Prospero on screen.
As the 1970s drew to a close, Von Sydow made a number of neglected films in Italy, including Francesco Rosi's masterly Sicilian thriller, Illustrious Corpses (1976). The same year, he showed dignity under duress, as Captain Schroeder taking command of the MS St Louis in Voyage of the Damned, Stuart Rosenberg's star-studded and deeply moving reconstruction of the story of 937 German Jews, who believed that they were sailing to a sanctuary in Cuba when they left Hamburg in 1939. But it was the Great War that provided the backdrop for Dick Richards's March or Die (1977), which cast Von Sydow as François Marneau, the archaeologist whose expedition into the Rif desert requires the protection of a French Foreign Legion detail led by Major William Foster (Gene Hackman).
Always an Outsider
At the peak of his powers, Von Sydow had complained that film-makers often overlooked him for fun roles because they considered him to be 'a Bergman actor' who was synonymous with anger and angst. Yet, as entered his sixties and started seeking challenging character roles, he discovered that he was forever being cast as clichéd foreigners because of his nationality. 'And who is the foreigner?' he once asked. 'He is either the villain or the mad scientist or the sane scientist or the psychoanalyst or the artist. But always an outsider.'
While he might have been frustrated by his narrowing options, Von Sydow was fortunate in being able to excel at the very types of roles he was offered. For example, despite making a late entry, he was unsettlingly inscrutable as Gerald, the estranged husband of Katherine Mortenhoe (Romy Schneider), the only woman in a healthy world to be suffering from a fatal disease in Death Watch (1980), Bertrand Tavernier's gritty adaptation of David G. Compton's novel, The Unsleeping Eye, which made dystopic use of its Glaswegian locations.
However, Von Sydow stole the show in assuming the role that Charles Middleton had brought to life from the grid of Alex Raymond's 1930s comic strip in such serials as Forde Beebe and Ray Taylor's Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940). Hailing from the planet Mongo, Ming the Merciless had reflected American fears about the so-called 'Yellow Peril' and, therefore, for all its pantomimic potency, it's impossible to disassociate Von Sydow's performance in Mike Hodges's Flash Gordon (1980) from such pernicious prejudice.
Von Sydow's knowing hamming proves a less problematic pleasure in John Milius's Conan the Barbarian (1982), however, as King Osric the Usurper dispatches the eponymous hero (Arnold Schwarzenegger) on a quest to rescue his daughter from snake cult leader Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones). Based on the stories of Robert E. Howard, this rousing adventure set a trend for sword-and-sorcery movies that reached its apogee in Peter Jackson's Oscar-winning adaptations of the works of JRR Tolkien. However, not even Von Sydow could save David Lynch's misfiring interpretation of Frank Herbert's Dune (1984), in which he took the relatively minor role of Dr Liet Kynes, the Imperial Planetologist of the desert realm, Arrakis.
In between these generic escapades, Von Sydow contentedly played fiddle to a bunch of famous footballers, a podgy Michael Caine and a scenery-chomping Sylvester Stallone as Major Karl von Steiner in John Huston's irresistible POW romp, Escape to Victory (1981). He also got to plot world domination by adding hallucinogenics to beer as Brewmaster Smith in Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas's cult comedy, Strange Brew, and plan SPECTRE's theft of two atomic warheads as Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Irwin Kershner's Never Say Never Again (both 1983), the unofficial remake of Terence Young's Thunderball (1965) that marked Sean Connery's last appearance as 007.
Von Sydow turned boffin in Joseph Ruben's Dreamscape (1984), as doctors Paul Novotny and Jane DeVries (Kate Capshaw) recruit psychic Alex Gardiner (Dennis Quaid) to use his powers to free the American president (Eddie Albert) from a dangerous nightmare. But Von Sydow spent much of the mid-1980s on the small screen. Having guested as Sidka, the envious Philistine lusting after Belinda Bauer in Lee Philips's biblical recreation, Samson and Delilah (1984), he assumed the mantle of Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, as Captain Robert Falcon Scott (Martin Shaw) and Roald Amundsen (Sverre Anker Ousdal) race for Antarctica in Ferdinand Fairfax's The Last Place on Earth. He even played concentration camp survivor Peter Barak, who goes into hiding when a Nazi war criminal surfaces in New York in Robert Markowitz's teleplay, Kojak: The Belarus File (both 1985), which stars Telly Savalas as the lollipop-sucking cop, Theo Kojak.
According to Woody Allen, the only two performers he has been overawed by as he directed them are Geraldine Page in Interiors (1978) and Max von Sydow in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), which saw the Swede come close to parodying his forbidding screen image as Frederick, the artist suspecting that partner Lee (Barbara Hershey) is cheating on him with her brother-in-law, Elliot (Michael Caine). The latter won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, but he is thoroughly upstaged by Von Sydow, as he barks out cutting remarks about wrestling and Auschwitz. His voice also stands out above the hubbub, even though Wilhelm von Homburg was the physical manifestation of Vigo the Carpathian in Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters II (1989).
But it was a European film that earned Von Sydow his first Academy Award nomination, as he was listed among the candidates for Best Actor for his gruelling performance as Lasse Karlsson, the Swedish labourer who tries to make a fresh start on a Danish island with his nine year-old son, Pelle (Pelle Hvenegaard), in Bille August's Pelle the Conqueror (1987), which not only won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, but also took the Palme d'Or at Cannes. There are echoes of the Troell diptych in the way the Karlssons have to endure vicissitudes and cruelties in finding their niche, but Von Sydow bristles with bruised dignity, as he faces each setback with fortitude and faith.
He would reunite with August to play Sigmund Freud in a 1993 episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and essay a vicar in the 1996 adaptation of Selma Lagerlöf's Jerusalem. Moreover, he also made his sole excursion into directing in Denmark, when he adapted Herman Bang's novel, Katinka (1988). This sobering story of a woman trapped in a loveless marriage won the Guldbagge Awards for Best Film and Best Director, but it was rarely seen outside Scandinavia. Rounding off a successful decade, Von Sydow also drew his first Emmy nomination for his sinister turn in Geoff Murphy's Red King, White Knight (1989), as Szaz, the KGB agent detailed to disrupt a CIA plot to prevent the termination of Perestroika.
The Incomparable Max
The roles might have become smaller from the early 1990s, but Von Sydow remained in demand and left an indelible mark on every picture he made. Having won the Australian Film Institute Best Actor Award for his work as Joe Mueller in John Power's Father, he gave a deeply moving performance as Fr Siemes, a crotchety German priest whose temperament is transformed by the dropping of the atom bomb in Peter Werner's Hiroshima: Out of the Ashes. He proved equally empathetic as Peter Ingham, the ageing doctor in 1960s New York helping Malcolm Sayer (Robin Williams) treat the catatonic survivors of the 1917-28 encephalitis lethargica epidemic in Penny Marshall's Awakenings (all 1990).
An even busier year followed, as Von Stroheim headlined The Ox, the directorial debut of Ingmar Bergman's regular cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, and narrated Lars von Trier's political thriller, Europa, which completed the trilogy started with The Element of Crime (1984) and Epidemic (1987). He also stood out as copper tycoon Thor Karlsson, whose troubled past comes under scrutiny when his daughter, Ellen, investigates the mysterious disappearance of her twin, Dorothy (both Sean Young), in James Dearden's adaptation of Ira Levin's novel, A Kiss Before Dying. Similarly, his brief turn as Henry Farber, the Australian-based inventor of a device for recording and interpreting brain impulses, illuminates Wim Wenders's sprawling sci-fi road movie, Until the End of the World (all 1991).
Following an unheralded darkly comic display as monstrously conniving alcoholic composer Henry Kesdi in Krzysztof Zanussi's The Silent Touch (1992), Von Sydow got to play Satan himself in the guise of Leland Gaunt, the seemingly kindly old gentleman who opens an unusual antique shop in Castle Rock, Maine in Fraser C. Heston's much-maligned take on Stephen King's Needful Things (1993). He similarly rose above the material as Fargo, the chief justice who takes a long walk into the lawless wasteland abutting the Mega-City 1 of 2139 after sparing the life of Sylvester Stallone's eponymous hero in Danny Cannon's brash 2000 AD adaptation, Judge Dredd (1995).
He was much better served by Hamsun (1996), a biopic of Nobel Prize-winning Norwegian novelist and Nazi sympathizer Knut Hamsun that saw Von Sydow rejoin forces with Jan Troell. But the extent to which this great artist had accepted his lot as an actor for hire is proved by his uncredited work as the narrator of Nicolas Roeg's The Bible: Samson and Delilah (1996) and his guest appearance as King David in Roger Young's The Bible: Solomon (1997).
His innate sense of spirituality was also evident as The Tracker providing Robin Williams with emotional support, as his restless spirit tries to guide wife Annabella Sciorra through the Afterlife in Vincent Ward's ambitious, if not entirely successful adaptation of Richard Matheson's novel, What Dreams May Come (1998), which won an Oscar for its visual effects. Von Sydow also crusades for justice as defence lawyer Nils Gudmundsson in Scott Hicks's take on David Guterson's bestseller, Snow Falling on Cedars (1999), which is set in the Puget Sound region of Washington state in 1950 and centres on the prosecution of Japanese American Kazuo Miyamoto (Rick Yune) after he is accused of killing a fisherman on a remote island.
In 1997, Von Sydow married French documentarist Catherine Brelet and adopted her two sons from a previous marriage. Having moved to Paris, he was forced to relinquish his Swedish passport in order to acquire French citizenship. But he continued to work around the world, as age reinforced his sense of gravitas and a new generation of film-makers clamoured for his services.
He revelled in the rare lead provided by Dario Argento in Sleepless, a giallo that sees retired Turin detective Ulisse Moretti reluctantly reopen the 1980s Dwarf Murders case when a series of crimes is committed according to the verses of a nursery rhyme. Von Sydow is on similarly good form in Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Intact (both 2001), as concentration camp survivor and casino owner Samuel Berg, who finds himself in a battle of wills with luck thief Federico (Eusebio Poncela) after he removes his power to sap fortune by merely touching a punter with his hand.
Longtime admirer Steven Spielberg finally got to work with Von Sydow by casting him in Minority Report (2002) as Lamar Burgess, the founder of PreCrime, a police unit in Washington, DC of the 2050s that uses mutant humans called Precogs to predict crimes of violence in an effort to eradicate murder. However, when Captain John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is accused of killing in this atmospheric adaptation of Philip K. Dick's tech-noir story, he begins to realise that zero crime comes at a price.
As ever with Von Sydow, his next two projects couldn't have offered a starker contrast, as he played Eyvind the blacksmith in Sword of Xanten (2004), Uli Edel's sprawling reworking of Die Nibelungen that co-stars Benno Furmann as Siegfried, Kristanna Loken as Brunhild and Alicia Witt as Kriemhild, and the grandfather to Emma Bolger in Paul Marcus's version of Johanna Spyri's timeless tale of the Swiss outdoors, Heidi (2005). There was another dramatic change of pace in Brett Ratner's Rush Hour 3 (2007), as Chief Inspector Yan Naing Lee (Jackie Chan) and Detective James Carter (Chris Tucker) are sent to investigate after a car bomb attempt is made to assassinate French ambassador and chairman of the World Criminal Court, Varden Reynard (Von Sydow).
But Von Sydow's finest performance of this period came in Julian Schnabel's refined adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby's poignant memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007). Filmed for free in a single day, his two scenes as Papinou see him boasting bullishly about his womanising past while being shaved by his son (Mathieu Amalric) and fighting back the tears to whisper words of encouragement down the phone after Jean-Dominique is stricken with locked-in syndrome.
There's a hint of déjà vu in Michael J. Bassett's adaptation of Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane (2009), as the Devil's Reaper journeys to the Maghreb to claim the soul of the eponymous 17th-century privateer (James Purefoy). However, there's no game of chess, as Solomon merely leaps from a window before returning to the English estate belonging to his estranged father, Josiah. Von Sydow is merely a passing presence, as he is as the uncredited train passenger in Joe Johnston's The Wolfman (2010). But he's marginally more prominent as Otto von Waldburg, the Prince-Bishop of Augsburg, in The Tudors (2009), as blind stepfather Sir Walter Loxley in Ridley Scott's Robin Hood, and as sinister German psychiatrist Dr Jeremiah Naehring at the Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane located in Boston Harbour in Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island (both 2010).
At the age of 82 years and 289 days, Von Sydow became the second oldest recipient of an Oscar nomination in the Best Supporting Actor category (a feat that has since twice been surpassed). Ironically, for a man who had performed in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, English, Italian, German, French and Spanish, he didn't say a word in Stephen Daldry's adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011). However, using a note pad and the 'Yes' and 'No' that he has had tattooed on to his hands, The Renter helps 10 year-old Asperger sufferer Oscar Schell (Thomas Horn) follow the clues that his father, Thomas (Tom Hanks), had amassed before his death on 9/11 in order to direct a mission to locate New York's 'lost Sixth Borough'.
How do you follow a wordless Oscar-nominated cameo? If you're Max von Sydow, you contribute vocal work to a clutch of video games and play Father Celeste van Exem, the Belgian Jesuit who helped Mother Teresa (Juliet Stevenson) set up her humanitarian mission in the Indian city of Kolkata in William Riead's Letters From Mother Teresa. He then ventured into the Star Wars universe to play Lor San Tekka, a retired adventurer living on the planet Jakku in JJ Abrams's The Force Awakens (both 2013). The next logical step was to voice art forger Klaus Ziegler in 'The War of Art', a 2014 episode in the 25th season of The Simpsons. And where else after that but to the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros to play Three-Eyed Raven in three episodes of Series 6 of Game of Thrones (2014) ?
Having secured his second Primetime Emmy nomination, the 88 year-old Von Sydow returned to the big screen to play Vladimir Petrenko, the Russian admiral whose attempts to play the blame game after a submarine disaster are shouted down at a press conference by the crew's families in Thomas Vinterberg's Kursk: The Last Mission (2018). Shortly before he died in Provence, he completed the role of Nikolas Andreou in Nicholas Dimitropoulos's Echoes of the Past, an account of a Nazi massacre on a Greek island that is due for release later this year. Who knows, by then, some of the other 50-odd films and TV shows that Max von Sydow graced might have found their way onto disc.
