He brought classical elegance to Conan the Barbarian, operatic grandeur to Flash Gordon and regained the trust of
Star Wars fans, preempting the surge of highbrow stars in sci-fi
When remembering the great Max von Sydow, it’s hard not to recall those iconic images of the medieval knight peering over the chess board into the sinister countenance of the grim reaper in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, or receiving a tender shave from Mathieu Amalric in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. But there was another side to the twice Oscar-nominated Swede.
These days, it’s far from unusual to see an Oscar-winning doyen of the art house turning up as a villain in a superhero movie, or donning the mo-cap suit to play a four-limbed alien in some outrageous space fantasy. But back in the 80s, Von Sydow’s turns in the likes of Flash Gordon, Dune and Conan the Barbarian would have been a little more unexpected to the cinema-going public.