Max von Sydow: Jesus at 60

To put von Sydow's career in perspective, you have to travel back over four decades to a day when Max was not Max, but Carl Adolf. He was onstage at the Royal Academy of Drama where his assigned task was to put on an imaginary flea circus. He pulled out a make-believe flea named Max from a make-believe box and played with him onstage. So popular was the act that von Sydow's classmates began calling him Max. He liked the ring of it, and felt it sounded dignified. Besides, in this post-World War II era there were better names to have than Adolf.

Von Sydow had gotten to the Academy over the protests of his parents. "My parents never thought about me being an actor at all. Acting did not belong in their world. They both came from very strict religious homes. Very orthodox, Protestant. Theater and all that had a sinful touch. My parents became proud of me when I was accepted at the Academy at the first attempt. That was proof I had something."

Just what von Sydow had was not clear at first: "All through my first years it seems that directors wanted to typecast me as a farmhand. That was O.K. for a time, but then I got a bit fed up with it. So, when suddenly I was offered this noble knight from the Crusades [in The Seventh Seal] it was a very exciting task.

"But when I made the film I was very tense. I was so tight-lipped. We used an acting style in Sweden that was very theatrical. We spoke as if we had an audience of 700 people. That disturbs me a great deal today." He stands up and thumps his chest. "I TALKED LIKE THIS. If I had to do it again I'd be different." (He concedes it might be fun to play Death in a remake.)

The Seventh Seal was the beginning of a collaboration between actor and director that makes the De Niro/Scorsese relationship pale by comparison. It was in Bergman's personal, radical films that the great actor in von Sydow emerged in the late fifties, sixties and seventies. And paradoxically, it is only Bergman's von Sydow that Hollywood seems to recognize. For despite how Hollywood has employed the actor over the years, it didn't appreciate him or reward him for the quality of his performances, until he made a somber Scandinavian film called Pelle the Conqueror. In 1988, he became only the fifth actor in history-- the second in this decade--to be nominated for a foreign language performance. "I was very, very moved that the actors of the Academy nominated me," he says. "I knew Dustin was going to win. I was absolutely convinced. I was nervous just that Pelle would not get the foreign film Oscar. I thought Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown would win. When Pelle won, it made me very happy."

And now von Sydow has directed his first film, a small piece titled Katinka, about a married woman in love with a mysterious stranger who has moved into her village and whom she can't have. "Katinka has a very warm and ironic sense of humor in many ways," von Sydow says. "It's a sad story about unfulfilled love. It has a lot of supporting characters that are quite funny. It has a lot of good spirit and humor in it. There are tears at the end. It is one of those stories where there is no drama. On the surface everything is fine, but underneath is where all the action is. I thought of Chekhov a lot when I did it." It's hardly surprising that von Sydow cites Bergman as the director who has most influenced him. "That's quite obvious, I suppose," he says. "But I really didn't follow anybody's example." There is a pause. "That's not quite true. I have been influenced in what not to do. I have been in films when the director was never able to make up his mind or communicate with his actors. He had no sense of practical arrangements, no overall view, no general concept. It's very frustrating. You have to tell him what he thinks."

What was remarkable about Bergman's directorial style? "He had a way of directing which worked very well. When we were about to shoot a very tense, tough scene--when everybody was uptight, including Mr. Bergman--he usually rehearsed everything. When he felt that everything was going well, he would break down and make fun of it all. Bergman can be a very funny man. When everybody forgot about all the difficulties and the tenseness," von Sydow claps his hands, "then he called us to attention and started shooting."

Katinka notwithstanding, von Sydow has no plans to make directing his second career. It took him thirty years to move from in front of the camera to behind it--a clear indication of where he feels most comfortable. And while he's indicated a desire to return to his roots and the Swedish stage in the near future, we can be certain that von Sydow, unlike Bergman, will not choose to remain there long. His desire to act seems commensurate with his need to travel. After finishing Katinka, he was on the boards at London's Old Vic, doing Shakespeare, and he followed that with a trip to Budapest where he played a KGB agent in an HBO movie, Red King, White Knight, as well as filming Dr. Grassier, in the role of an opera singer. He has since journeyed to Australia to star as a German accused of Nazi war crimes in Father. After that he'll portray yet another German--a missionary in NBC's upcoming "Hiroshima." Priests and Nazis--certainly, he's played these roles before. Perhaps such familiar territory is comforting to someone who spends so much time away from his native land. But in an era when most stars are so hyper-selective about their roles that they only appear on-screen once every five years, von Sydow is a throwback to the time when actors kept busy doing their very best in whatever came their way.

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Rod Lurie is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.

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