
His work in the movies by Ingmar Bergman (especially The Seventh Seal (1957), including the iconic scenes in which he plays chess with Death) made him well-known internationally, and he started to get offers from abroad. After graduation, he worked at the city theatres in Norrköping and Malmö. His first role was as Nils the crofter in Alf Sjöberg's Only a Mother (1949). After conscription, he began to study at the Royal Dramatic Theatre's acting school (1948-1951), together with Lars Ekborg, Margaretha Krook and Ingrid Thulin. When he was in high school, he and a few fellow students, including Yvonne Lombard, started a theatre club which encouraged his interest in acting. His surname traces back to his partial German ancestry. He was the son of Baroness Maria Margareta (Rappe), a teacher, and Carl Wilhelm von Sydow, an ethnologist and folklore professor.

von Sydow is reasonably tortured as the straddler of innocence and depravity and Miss Sanda exudes a hard, shallow beauty as his seductive counterpart.Max von Sydow was born Carl Adolf von Sydow on Apin Lund, Skåne, Sweden, to a middle-class family.

Hesse's philosophical thinking-often obvious on the printed page-translates even less forcefully to film. Its good-versus-evil thesis is expounded through a variety of surreal effects-including animated cartoons. This film adaptation of the Herman Hesse novel is one of those plunges into the “meaning-of-life” genre that still might excite the college freshman with intellectual pretensions but one whose excesses will seem a little silly-or boring-to most of the rest of us. Upon the film's release on home video, Bernard Holland wrote of it in The New York Times: The reviewer, Jacoba Atlas, highlighted "one of the finest ‘dream’ sequences ever put on film using every cinematic technique from step-printing to chromatic negatives".
#Max von sydow harry potter free#
In the Los Angeles Free Press found the film "beautifully shot, well-acted, but only partly successful", attributing this to the difficulty in translating to the screen Hesse's "stream-of-consciousness, interior writing" style. For decades the film remained little seen except for brief runs in art film houses. A "marketing disaster" followed, which included the colour of the prints coming out incorrectly. įinally, the rights to the finished film were entirely given over to Peter Sprague, its financier. Steppenwolf was filmed on location in Basel, Switzerland, Wiesbaden, Germany, and at Studio Hamburg in Germany. Although the film was made in English, none of the principal actors were native English speakers. Īlthough Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon and Timothy Leary were all proposed as playing the main role of Harry Haller, the role eventually went to Max von Sydow. In the end, the film was directed by its screenwriter, Fred Haines.

Herland raised the finances.ĭirectors Michelangelo Antonioni and John Frankenheimer, as well as the actor James Coburn were all touted to direct the film.

The film took seven years of complicated pre-production because its producers, Melvin Abner Fishman and Richard Herland – a student of Jung and alchemy – wanted the film to be "the first Jungian film" and built up relationships with the Hesse family that allowed the film rights of the book to be released. Hesse's daughter-in-law, Ida, worked as a still photographer on the set.
