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All Max von Sydow Movies Ranked
Carl Adolf von Sydow, better known as Max von Sydow, fell in love with acting at an early age, helping to found theatrical groups both at his high school in Sweden and later at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, where he studied after completing two years of military service. When he eventually joined the Malmö City Theatre in 1955, he met and began a prolific working relationship with Ingmar Bergman, starring in 11 of the celebrated director’s films. Even as they continued to work together on stage, the pair took their partnership to the big screen with films like The Seventh Seal, one of Bergman’s most iconic pictures, and such classics as Wild Strawberries, Winter Light, The Virgin Spring, and Through a Glass Darkly, the latter two of which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Having drawn interest from Hollywood for his powerful performances, von Sydow eventually made the transition in 1965 with George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told, in which he took on the role of none other than Jesus Christ himself. The high-profile role earned him further recognition and led to an eclectic career that would see him tackling genre fare like Flash Gordon, Conan the Barbarian, and The Exorcist and working with directors like John Huston (The Kremlin Letter), Woody Allen (Hannah and Her Sisters), Sydney Pollack (Three Days of the Condor), David Lynch (Dune), Penny Marshall (Awakenings), Steven Spielberg (Minority Report), and Martin Scorsese (Shutter Island), among others.
Over the course of his storied career, von Sydow earned two Academy Award nominations: one in 1989 for his lead role in Pelle the Conqueror and a Best Supporting Actor nod in 2012 for Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Meanwhile, he also found time to make his mark on television, appearing in Showtime’s The Tudors and in HBO’s Game of Thrones, in which he played the mystical Three-Eyed Raven and earned an Emmy nomination for his performance. In 2015, at the age of 86 years old, von Sydow even made it into the Star Wars universe as the ill-fated Lor San Tekka in the opening scenes of The Force Awakens. In 2018, he starred in Thomas Vinterberg’s historical thriller The Command, and his final on-screen performance is still to come in Echoes of the Past, a drama in which he portrays a writer with terminal cancer reflecting on a World War II tragedy.
Max von Sydow passed away on March 8, 2020 at the age of 90, leaving behind a legacy that includes some of the most influential films in all of cinema. He was a versatile actor capable of bringing a powerful weight to even the smallest of performances, so take a look back at his filmography as we rank all of Max von Sydow’s movies by Tomatometer.
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Thumbnail images by Everett Collection, Warner Bros. Pictures, New Line Cinema courtesy Everett Collection
