Blok is a study in anguish and self-loathing. Von Sydow was 28 when his film career started in earnest with his role as the questing knight Antonius Blok, seeking knowledge and human contact in the face of death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957). He must have known that his best and most challenging work was done back home in Europe. As a classically trained actor with a distinguished stage career behind him, he was secure enough in his reputation not to worry about playing stock types in studio movies. One senses that von Sydow never took his US adventures too seriously. “And who is the foreigner? He is either the villain or the mad scientist or the sane scientist or the psychoanalyst or the artist. “Because I am not English or American, the parts I get are the foreigners,” he said in an interview with the Guardian. Either he plays visionaries, judges, priests and artists, or he’s the outsider/villain of choice, like Conrad Veidt and Peter Lorre a generation before. He passed on the opportunity, though he was later to play Blofeld in Sean Connery’s 1983 comeback film as 007, Never Say Never Again.Īnd Christ and Blofeld provide the templates for von Sydow’s Hollywood career, with almost every other role a variation on one of these two prototypes. A few years earlier his agent had sounded him out about appearing in a James Bond movie. I was professionally dedicated but that was all.”Ĭhrist wasn’t the first studio part von Sydow was offered. They expected me to be very dedicated on every level, which of course I wasn’t. “They did because it was supposed to be the definitive life of Jesus on film. In interviews he tells colourful anecdotes about being baptised by Charlton Heston (John the Baptist) in the Colorado River and being harassed by the small army of ultra-religious extras, who often seemed to confuse him with his role.
“It didn’t tum out at all how I expected.”Ĭontrary to his screen persona as the saturnine and tormented Scandinavian, von Sydow has a droll sense of humour. “Playing Jesus was in a way an impossible task,” he later recalled. George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) is distinctly patchy even as biblical epics go, but largely thanks to his efforts as the Messiah, von Sydow (in his first non-Swedish part) became an international star. One of the more unlikely sights in 1960s Hollywood cinema is John Wayne’s Centurion, in Roman toga and sandals, standing beneath the crucifix and declaiming in his rasping, frontier voice that “Truly, this man was the son of God!” The unfortunate Christ, nailed up above him, is Max von Sydow. Max von Sydow as Jesus Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)
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