In a brief interview with Lynn Hirschberg in The New York Times Magazine, Max Von Sydow Max von Sydow talks about his long association with Ingmar Bergman, who died last year. “'He had been ill for almost a year, but we had been in close contact over the phone. . . . ' Von Sydow’s wife interrupted him. 'Tell about the last time he spoke about you,' she said. Von Sydow paused again. 'He said, "Max you have been the first and the best Stradivarius that I have ever had in my hands,” ' von Sydow recalled. 'We loved each other, and I know when he stopped working, when he became ill, he missed it. He missed his actors.' Von Sydow says that "working with Bergman was always worthwhile."
Not incidentally, working with Bergman made him a star. “I actually know the moment I became known. It was at the Cannes Film Festival, when they showed The Virgin Spring. I walked into that theater as one person and I walked out as another.” Of course, there's being known and then there's being known. in the early years of his international career, Hollywood thought it knew who Von Sydow was: a tall, stern-looking guy with a sinister accent who seemed impressively foreign. “They sent me Dr. No. They wanted me to play the villain. I said no. And then they offered me the part of Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told. I said yes to that. For years, Hollywood only asked me to play a villain or a biblical figure.” This past year, the 78-year-old Sydow had one of his best recent roles as the 92-year-old father of the paralyzed hero of Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. “After Julian sent me the script, we didn’t discuss it very much. He didn’t tell me that, in some ways, I would be playing his father. But movies are like that — I had never met Mathieu Amalric until the day of our first scene, and he had to shave me. It was rather intimate, and he did cut me. But it’s always that way: you’re supposed to be involved with someone in the film and you’ve just met them for the first time and then, 10 minutes later, you say, ‘I love you,’ and you are in bed.”