MAX VON SYDOW: THE GREATEST EMIGRANT ACTOR

It was an epitaph of our times to see some headlines about the death of Max von Sydow lede with his guest appearance in Game Of Thrones. But that was just for the audience of the age of enlightenment by the glowing computer screen. Most of the ledes highlighted either The Seventh Seal or The Exorcist, or both. Though I will admit to more than a little surprise that the papers in Brexit Britain did not open with his classic role as the villainous German Major Karl von Steiner, defeated by Michael Caine’s bulldog British tenacity, plus Pele and Sly Stallone, in the patriotic epic Escape To Victory.

Von Sydow possessed all the attributes an actor needs: he could play handsome, could play strong, could play intelligent, could play stubborn and simple. He brought this wide spectrum to bear on his art, and perhaps because he was so versatile, because he could both proclaim (he did Prospero in Jonathan Miller’s 1988 Old Vic production) and express himself without proclaiming (like Robert Mitchum and better, say, than Brando) he fell between styles in the audience’s imagination. His career in many other ways fell between the recognised boundaries.

Ingmar Bergman

If you came of age in the movies half a century ago, there were foreign language directors whose every release in English was an event: Fellini, Bunuel, Ray, Kurasawa, Godard and many more, but Ingmar Bergman may have been the one who was taken the most seriously. And of course The Seventh Seal was the apex of that seriousness: a…