“It is with a broken heart and with infinite sadness that we have the extreme pain of announcing the departure of Max von Sydow on March 8, 2020,” Catherine von Sydow said in a statement.
Max von Sydow and his wife, Catherine Brelet, at the Cannes Film Festival in southern France.
“What I as an actor look for is a variety of parts. It is very boring to be stuck in more or less one type of character,” he once said in an interview.. He turned down the role as the sinister Dr No in the first James Bond film with the same name, but later appeared as the cat-stroking villain Ernst Blofeld in the 1983He also played a tormented painter in Woody Allen’s, a 1991 horror film based on a novel by Stephen King.
One of his final roles was as a stern Russian admiral in Thomas Vinterberg’s 2018 English-language film about the 2000 Kursk Russian submarine disaster.While his characters were often sinister, tormented or evil, the soft-spoken von Sydow said he became an actor to overcome his own shyness.“When I started acting in an amateur group in high school, although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I suddenly got a tool in my hand that was wonderful.
“I was allowed to express all kinds of strange things that I never dared to express before. Now I could do it with the character as a shield, as a defence, and as an excuse.Von Sydow took French citizenship in 2002 and renounced his Swedish nationality.
R.I.P. 🌹
RIP Max !