He was in so many different genres of movies...I first remember him from The Emigrants way back in 1971...of course The Exorcist (1973), Dune (1984), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), all the way up to GOT and Star Wars...
RIP
Astonishing that he was only 44 when he played Father Merrin in The Exorcist. Has to be one of the best old age make up jobs ever. And this was 1973.
In fact, even in later life Sydow never got to look as old as he appeared in The Exorcist.
R.I.P.
Because of that makeup I always thought he was a lot older than he was. Definitely the best old age make-up which rarely convinces.
shareYes, but it wasn't only the makeup. His manner, deportment, speech patterns, and total demeanour was utterly convincing. The part where he's sitting at an outside "cafe" in Iraq, and has to hurriedly take his heart medication, was astonishingly real. The shift of his eyes, the breathing, the posture, was uncannily true-to-life.
For that moment alone, I considered him the most authentic actor of emotions I had ever seen.
Watch The Seventh Seal.
It is a great movie where he's the star not a side character.
It's about a knight coming home from the crusades with his friends. They all catch the plague and Death shows up. He challenges Death to a chess game for their lives.
Timely plague story too!
Unfortunately, I didn't care for that movie at all.
shareWhy not?
Do you like symbolic films?
I found it so weird and pretentious, that I couldn't even finish watching it. But I guess that early black and white Bergman is not my cup of tea in general.
shareIt is supposed to be weird.
But "pretentious" meaning pretending to be something it's not, so I don't get what it's pretending to be.
It's a movie about a guy who meets Death and wants to keep his friends alive so he challenges him to a game of wits. Meanwhile, it's in a time when mass numbers of people were dying terribly, so it's a weird setting.
Obviously, it's not a "true story" so it's about something else. It's a symbolic allegorical story.
it seems to be about a couple of things like, no matter how good you are, you can't escape death or stop chaos. So, it's a film about man's struggle dealing with the end of everything they know.
Cheerful!
When I called it "pretentious", what I meant was that it was trying much too hard to be "high art" and "not mainstream". Sure, some people can enjoy such a movie too. And yeah, the world is big enough for a lot of different genres to exist side by side. But it seems like this movie was simply never meant to appeal to my taste.
shareI saw it twice years ago and that was enough for me!
I see what you mean.
RIP
What a consistent career
1950's - Wild Strawberries , The Seventh Seal
1960's - The Virgin Spring , The Greatest Story Ever Told , Shame
1970's - The Exorcist , Three Days of the Condor , March or Die
1980's - Flash Gordon , Conan the Barbarin , Dune , Pelle the Conqueror
1990's - Awakenings , Europa , Citizen X , Judge Dredd , What Dreams May Come
2000's - Minority Report , Rush Hour ,
2010's - Shutter Island , Robin Hood , Extremely Louds & Incredibly Close , SW VII: The Force Awekens
Sad but 90 years was a good long run and he sure made the most of it
RIP Max