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the players
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liv ullmann
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max von sydow
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 MAX VON SYDOW
When one thinks of Scandinavian movie stars, the first name that comes to mind is Max von Sydow. Since his screen debut in 1949 in Alf Sj�berg's
Only a Mother, he has appeared in countless films, including titles as diverse as
Hannah and Her Sisters and Conan the Barbarian, The Emigrants and
The Exorcist, Pelle the Conqueror and Judge Dredd. The actor is easily recognized by his gaunt appearance: he is tall, with a long, lean face and sharp features. These physical characteristics have been an asset in both aspects of his screen career, comprised of the character roles he has played in English-language films and his status as a principal on-screen interpreter of Ingmar Bergman.
In the United States, von Sydow enjoys the reputation of a serious actor, due to the roles he plays�character ones, rather than leading men or traditional star parts�and his past association with Bergman. He earned his initial international acclaim in Bergman-directed films, particularly
The Seventh Seal (as the tormented knight who rides through the plague-ridden countryside in search of a good deed he might perform before the figure of Death takes him away) and
The Virgin Spring (as the father who avenges the rape-murder of his young daughter). Indeed, in his best roles for Bergman (in which he has, more often than not, played husbands and artists), von Sydow has embodied the anguished soul who suffers as a result of his desires, or guilt, or the guilt he feels because of his desires. Throughout his career, he has remained active on the stage, often working with Bergman on the latter's theatrical undertakings; in fact, he began his collaboration with Bergman in the 1950s when he joined the Municipal Theatre of Malm�, where Bergman was the principal director.
� International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers
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| Born: |
Carl Adolf von Sydow, 10 April 1929, in Lund, Sweden. |
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| Education: |
Cathedral School of Lund; Royal Dramatic Theatre School, Stockholm, graduated 1951. |
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| Family: |
 Married the actress Kerstin Olin, 1951; sons: Clas and Henrik.
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| Career: |
1949: film debut in Bara en Mor.
1951-53: actor for Norrk�ping-Kink�ping Municipal Theatre.
1953-55: actor for Municipal Theatre of H�lsingborg.
1955-60: actor for Municipal Theatre of Malm�.
1957: appeared in The Seventh Seal, the first of several films with Bergman.
1960: joined the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm.
1965: role of Christ in first U.S. film, The Greatest Story Ever Told.
1977: Broadway debut in The Night of the Tribades.
1988: directed first film, Vid vegen (Katinka).
1988: on stage in The Tempest at the Old Vic, London.
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| BERGMAN FILMS |
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| Max von Sydow has appeared in the following Bergman-directed films: |
| COMMENTARY |
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"I have been brought up as a stage actor and there is where I feel at home, but I still feel that the cinema has one great advantage over the theatre. Namely, proximity to the audience. Of course in a film an actor always has only himself as an audience while on a stage he can achieve a result along with his audience. However, when you stand on a stage, you can never work with your face in the same way as you can in front of a camera."
� Max von Sydow, 1965
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"I am considered to be an intellectual actor and I also am one inasmuch as I want to be aware of what I am doing. But I never try to influence the writing of the manuscript."
� Max von Sydow, 1965
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"Many persons believe that an actor must identify himself with his role. I do not do that, although I do become involved with my parts while I play them. But I find it a virtue to do things which are not of myself. This is the Swedish concept of an actor."
� Max von Sydow
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"There's an enigmatic relationship between Max and myself. He has meant a tremendous amount to me....As an actor, Max is sound through and through. Robust. Technically durable. If I'd had a psychopath to present these deeply psychopathic roles, it would have been unbearable. It's a question of acting the part of a broken man, not of being him. The sort of exhibitionism in this respect which is all the rage just now will pass over, I think. By and by people will regain their feeling for the subtle detachment which often exists between Max and my madmen."
� Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman (1968)
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"He is a friend I love dearly as perhaps you can only love someone you have both worked with and known personally. It is a double relationship mixed into one. We haven't worked together for several years and I miss that very much."
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"The theatre is more a medium for an actor than the cinema is. You are totally responsible for what you do on the stage; in a film, someone else can come in and edit you and do something totally different to what you had in mind originally, and they can cut you out, play around with the scenes or the chronology of the story. This happens always�more or less�in the cinema. On the stage, you deliver a performance and that is your responsibility. So film-making is much more a director's medium than it is an actor's."
� Max von Sydow
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"I don't think they [Bergman's roles] were written for me as a personality. Many of his characters through the years have been related: there are those who want to believe but cannot, and there are those who believe like children and it's no problem for them at all, and there are those who do not want to believe, and there are the strains between these various characters and their conflicts, which are all probably conflicts within Ingmar himself."
� Max von Sydow
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"At home [in Sweden], the actor's profession was not considered particularly reputable, but being an actor or star in a Hollywood film was something very important in American eyes. Then I slowly realized that as an actor in Sweden you were allowed to be involved in some kind of artistic project which could be a flop and yet still be justifiable if it carried artistic weight and ambitions. In Hollywood, on the other hand, if you do not succeed you are nobody. You become a mere piece of paper with a figure on it. You are just as good�or bad�as your last film was financially. And while Sweden remains sufficiently small for you to work in, say, Malm� and still make films in Stockholm, in the States you either work in Hollywood or you live somewhere else and you work for the legitimate theatre."
� Max von Sydow
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"If I watch my old films, for example The Seventh Seal, I realize I do a lot of stage acting there; I have always been disturbed by the declamatory fashion in which I speak in a film like that. But then TV suddenly swept through Sweden, and we were all soon accustomed to realism, from newsreels, talk shows, and then of course there was the Method school of acting, which exerted an influence in Europe also. Today, theatre actors, and film actors with a stage background, use a different style to the one we subscribed to during the 1940s and 1950s. Bergman's dialogue in those days was very stylized, so it would have been difficult for me to speak those lines realistically."
� Max von Sydow
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"Sometimes I receive strange letters, and occasionally people come up to me in the street and say odd things. They want to be deceived, so it is difficult to disabuse them. At times it is tiring not to be allowed to be a private person. If you are really marked out as a film star in the United States, then it must be absolutely exhausting and hard to maintain your integrity. Fortunately, Swedes are very reserved as a people and seldom show their emotions or feelings in public, so one is not subject to that kind of pressure in the country where I come from."
� Max von Sydow
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"I admire people like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Marlon Brando, Spencer Tracy, who seem to be so very real�I don't know how they do it. When I was young I admired Leslie Howard enormously, in films like The Scarlet Pimpernel, Gone With the Wind, and Pygmalion. Also Gary Cooper; perhaps he was not a great actor, but he had a great presence."
� Max von Sydow
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"You have to get more involved in a Bergman film than you do in others, because it deals with much deeper and more philosophic questions than the average movie. He also establishes a much closer relationship with his actors and technicians than would ever be possible on larger productions."
� Max von Sydow
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