Biografía

Fluent in a number of languages, including Swedish, English, French and Italian.

He appeared in 13 films directed by Ingmar Bergman: El séptimo sello (1957), Fresas silvestres (1957), Herr Sleeman kommer (1957), Tres almas desnudas (1958), El rostro (1958), Rabies (1958), El manantial de la doncella (1960), A través de un vidrio oscuro (1961), Luz de invierno (1963), La hora del lobo (1968), Vergüenza (1968), La pasión de Ana (1969) and El toque (1971).

He was offered the title role in the first James Bond film El satánico Dr. No (1962), which went to Joseph Wiseman.

He was one of the few actors to have played both God (in La más grande historia jamás contada (1965)) and the Devil (in Pacto con el diablo (1993)).

He was one of six Swedish actors to be nominated for an Academy Award. The others are Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, Ann-Margret, Lena Olin and Alicia Vikander. von Sydow is the only male Swedish actor to be nominated for an Oscar.

The theater is more a medium for an actor than the cinema is. You are totally responsible for what you do on the stage; in a film, someone else can come in and edit you and do something totally different to what you had in mind originally, and they can cut you out, play around with the scenes or the chronology of the story. This happens always-more or less-in the cinema. On the stage, you deliver a performance and that is your responsibility. So filmmaking is much more a director's medium than it is an actor's.

If I watch my old films, for example El séptimo sello (1957), I realize I do a lot of stage acting there; I have always been disturbed by the declamatory fashion in which I speak in a film like that. But then television suddenly swept through Sweden, and we were all soon accustomed to realism, from newsreels, talk shows, and then of course there was the Method school of acting, which exerted an influence in Europe also. Today, theater actors, and film actors with a stage background, use a different style to the one we subscribed to during the 1940s and 1950s. Bergman's dialog in those days was very stylized, so it would have been difficult for me to speak those lines realistically.

Sometimes I receive strange letters, and occasionally people come up to me in the street and say odd things. They want to be deceived, so it is difficult to disabuse them. At times, it is tiring not to be allowed to be a private person. If you are really marked out as a film star in the United States, then it must be absolutely exhausting and hard to maintain your integrity. Fortunately, Swedes are very reserved as a people and seldom show their emotions or feelings in public, so one is not subject to that kind of pressure in the country where I come from.

I admire people like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Marlon Brando, Spencer Tracy, who seem to be so very real-I don't know how they do it. When I was young, I admired Leslie Howard enormously, in films like El Pimpinela Escarlata (1934), Lo que el viento se llevó (1939), and Pigmalión (1938). Also Gary Cooper; perhaps he was not a great actor, but he had a great presence.

At home [in Sweden], the actor's profession was not considered particularly reputable, but being an actor or star in a Hollywood film was something very important in American eyes. Then I slowly realized that as an actor in Sweden you were allowed to be involved in some kind of artistic project which could be a flop and yet still be justifiable if it carried artistic weight and ambitions. In Hollywood, on the other hand, if you do not succeed you are nobody. You become a mere piece of paper with a figure on it. You are just as good-or bad-as your last film was financially. And while Sweden remains sufficiently small for you to work in, say, Malmö and still make films in Stockholm, in the States you either work in Hollywood or you live somewhere else and you work for the legitimate theater.