On March 8, Max von Sydow (1929-2020) lost his chess match with death.
The Swedish actor, who made his name starring in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), died in France at 90. He was internationally known as one of the best actors of his or any generation and appeared in more than 80 films in a nearly seven-decade career.
From the start, von Sydow’s career was marked by a struggle with death. In The Seventh Seal, he played Antonius Block, a crusader making his way through a country ravaged by plague. Death incarnate visits him, and Block challenges the hooded figure to a chess match. Throughout the film, the two argue about the meaning of life as Block becomes more certain that his game is unwinnable.
In one scene, Block, seated in a church confessional, admits to Death his doubt in God’s existence. “I want knowledge,” he says. “Not conjecture, but knowledge. I want God to reach out his hand, show his face, speak to me. But he is silent. I cry to him in the darkness, but sometimes, it feels like no one is there.”
Looking back on the scene in 2011, von Sydow said that the anguish in his face as he said those words was real: He, too, was uncertain about God and the afterlife. Between takes, he said, he would argue with Bergman about the existence of God and whether there was anything more after this life. Bergman insisted that there was and assured von Sydow that he would prove it to the doubting actor after his own death.
“I’ve heard from Bergman many times,” von Sydow chuckled to Charlie Rose several years after the director’s death in 2007, adding that he no longer doubted the afterlife.
In life, the bond between von Sydow and Bergman was just as tight. The actor appeared in 11 of the director’s films and starred in six, notably The Virgin Spring (1960), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), and Hour of the Wolf (1968). Perhaps because he was tall, blue-eyed, and gaunt even as a young man, he was one of the famously angst-ridden Bergman’s favorite actors. Late in life, von Sydow recalled how in his last conversation with Bergman, the director told him that he was “the first and the best Stradivarius that I have ever had in my hands.”
Beyond Bergman, von Sydow also had a successful Hollywood career after playing Jesus Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). But most American audiences remember him best for his performance in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1974), based on the novel by William Peter Blatty. Here, von Sydow plays the titular exorcist, Rev. Lankester Merrin, a small role but the film’s most compelling — for two reasons.
The first is the shot introducing Merrin. Von Sydow enters the movie as a silhouette, walking under a lamp post. Aside from scenes from the chess match in The Seventh Seal, this is the nearest the actor came to appearing iconic. And the shot has a special place in Washington, where it is engraved into a commemorative plaque at the bottom of the Exorcist Steps in Georgetown.
The second reason is Merrin’s repeated incantation during the actual exorcism: “The power of Christ compels you.” A lesser actor would have botched the line, mistaking it as a bold broadside against the Devil. But von Sydow knew better: When he shouts it, he sounds both authoritative and desperate, which is, after all, how imperfect people attack evil.
Performances such as the one in The Greatest Story Ever Told and The Exorcist locked von Sydow into a trajectory of being consistently cast in priestly or otherwise mystical roles. “I don’t know how many priests or clergymen I’ve been offered to play,” von Sydow once joked, speculating that it was probably because most casting directors do not have “very much imagination.”
But von Sydow excelled when directors cast him in roles outside of the priestly caste. He played an assassin in The Three Days of the Condor (1975), a cold bureaucrat in Minority Report (2002), and a mute renter in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011). The most memorable of these types of roles, though, is from Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), in which von Sydow plays a reclusive artist. Allen, a Bergman devotee, taps into the darkness of von Sydow’s early films and plays it for laughs.
The performance in Hannah and Her Sisters is von Sydow at his best: morbid and serious, but not so far gone as not to realize that struggling with death is, ultimately, pretty funny.
Nicholas Rowan is a staff writer for the Washington Examiner.
