#MAX VON SYDOW TV#

'I think I owe very much to those years.' 'I'm very grateful to the schooling I had in Sweden because in order to learn acting you have to work, work, work,' he said. He studied at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm and acted in small municipality theaters in Sweden for eight years - an experience he later described as crucial for his career. He decided he wanted to be an actor and formed a theater society with his friends after seeing his first play, William Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' at age 14. He was baptized Carl Adolf von Sydow, but later changed his first name to Max, saying his given name was 'not a good name' after World War II.Īlthough his family was not interested in theater, he said his father was a master of telling adventure stories that fueled his imagination as a child. Von Sydow was born April 10, 1929, into a family of academics in the southern Swedish city of Lund. 'I think that for many years I used my profession as some kind of a mental therapy.' Now I could do it with the character as a shield, as a defense, and as an excuse.

I was allowed to express all kinds of strange things that I never dared to express before. 'When I started acting in an amateur group in high school, although I wasn't aware of it at the time, I suddenly got a tool in my hand that was wonderful. 'I was a very shy boy when I was a kid,' he said in an Associated Press interview. While his characters were often sinister, tormented or evil, the soft-spoken von Sydow said he became an actor to overcome his own shyness. In 2015, he appeared briefly in the blockbuster 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens.' He also played a tormented painter in Woody Allen's 'Hannah and Her Sisters' and portrayed the devil in 'Needful Things,' a 1991 horror film based on a novel by Stephen King.

No in the first James Bond film with the same name, but later appeared as the cat-stroking villain Ernst Blofeld in the 1983 'Never Say Never Again,' starring Sean Connery as Bond. In 1980, von Sydow starred as the evil emperor Ming the Merciless in 'Flash Gordon.' He turned down the role as the sinister Dr. He received two Academy Award nominations - for best actor in 1988 for his gripping portrayal of an impoverished farmer in 'Pelle the Conqueror,' and best supporting actor in 2012 for his role as a mute in 'Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.' More recently, he received an Emmy nomination for his work as the Three-Eyed Raven in HBO's 'Game of Thrones.'

#MAX VON SYDOW TV#

Max von Sydow as the Renter in 'Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.'įrom his 1949 screen debut in the Swedish film 'Only a Mother,' von Sydow starred in close to 200 film and TV productions, remaining active well into his 80s. 'It is with a broken heart and with infinite sadness that we have the extreme pain of announcing the departure of Max von Sydow,' Diamond said. His agent Jean Diamond said Monday that the actor, who was born in Sweden but became a French citizen in 2002, died the previous day in France. Copenhagen, Denmark - Max von Sydow, the self-described 'shy boy'-turned-actor known to art house audiences through his work with Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and later to moviegoers everywhere when he played the priest in the horror classic 'The Exorcist,' has died.

Max von sydow