Max von Sydow can do more with a walk than most actors can do with 10 pages of dialogue. See him in ”Pelle the Conqueror,” which opened in Chicago recently, and you`ll know just what that means.
As Lasse Karlsson, Pelle`s itinerant farm-worker father (a role that has earned him a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination), he shambles across the screen, all elbows and knees, hands flapping, duck-footed, head bobbing down in habitual obeisance with every step. It`s a walk that speaks of a lifetime of oppression.
It shouldn`t surprise you to learn that this is not the way he walks as Max von Sydow. Straight, restrained and deliberate in his movements, he has a slight stoop that comes, no doubt, from looking down at the rest of us from his 6-foot 4-inch vantage.
The Swedish actor is in every way a big man-big hands, big head, with that familiar long face (wreathed today with a close-trimmed white beard)-but his voice, that magnificent baritone, is so soft that it`s sometimes necessary to lean forward a little to get his answers to questions about the film.
”The social structure in Scandinavia was pretty primitive in rural areas until, oh, the early `40s,” he explains. ”The people who worked the big farms were essentially migrant workers. Every first of October, there would be a great movement-huge families, lots of kids, finding new work for room and board and a certain minimal salary. They had to sign on for a year. If you quit before that time, the police would take you.
”They had the authorities on their side. That is why the foreman is as tough as he is, why the majority of the workers don`t stand up and tell him their opinions. That is why Lasse doesn`t make the decision to leave. . . . Pelle could run away. Lasse knew that if he went, the police would get him.”
Max von Sydow was born in Lund, Sweden, 59 years ago, the son of a professor of comparative folklore at the Royal University there. He spent his summers with his mother`s people on a farm in the country, just north of there. ”That`s how I know this period of history,” he says. ”I felt I knew this man, Lasse. I met people like this, spent every summer with them.”
Professor von Sydow was 50 when Max was born. Neither he nor his wife was in the habit of going to the cinema, and so they saw to it that their son read a good deal. And, as von Sydow explains: ”Lund had no theater. There was nothing nearby, not until I was 14, and there was a huge modern one built in the neighbor city, Malmo. I was immediately overcome by the magic of the theater. With my friends, I started an amateur company. We played the classics. Oh, we were very brave. We played everything.
”You see, I was an only child, quite shy, and when I then discovered acting, it was a therapy for me,” he continues. ”I didn`t understand that then, of course, but I discovered it later. Acting gave me a chance to express myself, so that was all I wanted to do. My father wanted me to go to the university and study law, be a judge someday. But when I held out for the theater, I didn`t have difficulties from my parents. They thought: `Well, OK. If he succeeds, good, and if he doesn`t, he can still study law.` ”
He succeeded. After completing the course at the Royal Academy in Stockholm, he did repertory theater all over Sweden, gaining experience in a wide variety of roles. And along the way, he met the man who was to play such an important role in his life: Ingmar Bergman was the chief director of the municipal theater at Malmo when von Sydow returned there.
Bergman directed him there in everything from ”Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”
to ”Faust” and then chose him for the role of the knight in what would be von Sydow`s first (and unforgettable) major movie role, ”The Seventh Seal.” That was in 1956.
”I`ve worked with him the most,” says von Sydow. ”He`s really an actor`s dream because he has enormous experience of the stage and film and also because he knows so much about human nature. He knows how to tell about conflict. People who work with him want to work again and again. He gives great freedom to actors.”
Max von Sydow`s film work in Sweden-first with Bergman (including
”Virgin Spring,” ”Through a Glass Darkly,” ”Winter Light,”) and later with Jan Troell (”The Emigrants,” ”The New Land”)-made him an
international star. His first English-language role was as Jesus in George Stevens` ”The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1965). Since then he has become a very familiar face in American films, playing everything from the title role in ”The Exorcist” to Ming the Merciless in ”Flash Gordon.” His most recent American picture was Woody Allen`s ”Hannah and Her Sisters.”
Von Sydow`s status as an international star was, in a sense, thrust upon him. In 1973, he left Sweden in anger at what he considered an unfairly large income-tax bill and then was reassessed an additional $20,000 by Swedish tax authorities.
He put his case before the European Human Rights Commission in 1987, claiming that the fact that there was no possibility of appeal to the tax authorities was an infringement upon his rights. The case was decided in his favor last year, and the Swedish government made an out-of-court settlement, paying von Sydow $33,333 and $20,000 in court costs.
From 1973 to the present, he has lived in Rome and Paris and until last year, returned to Sweden only on vacations. As a result, he was away from the Swedish stage for 14 years. But after his tax settlement, he returned last year to Stockholm`s Royal Dramatic Theater and scored a great success in Strindberg`s ”Master Olof.”
”I have missed the stage. I`ve been postponing things so long. I`m afraid the parts won`t be there for me when I finally find time to play them,” he says.
And so he made it a point to find time. Last October, he rather daringly opened as Prospero in Jonathan Miller`s production of ”The Tempest” at London`s Old Vic Theatre.
”I`ve done Shakespeare many times in Swedish, but this was the first time in English,” von Sydow says. ”Acting Shakespeare in his own language-well, it was extremely tough, but it went well. We had a six-week run, and it was very well-received.”
It was a very big year overall for von Sydow-a return to the Swedish stage, a debut on the London stage, a triumph for ”Pelle the Conqueror” at Cannes (it won the top-honor Golden Palm Award) and finally a good reception at the Festival for von Sydow`s first film as a director, ”Katinka.”
And this year? In January he was in Rome to star in the film version of
`Benvenuto Cellini.”
Playing Cellini, the notorious master silversmith, lover, swordsman and egotist?
A laconic smile spreads over his face, and he rubs his beard. ”I played one of the popes,” he says.
