![]() ![]() Between takes Friedkin took the actor to one side and asked what the problem was. When 15 years later William Friedkin directed von Sydow as Father Merrin in The Exorcist he found him struggling to invoke the name of the Holy Trinity with any conviction during the exorcism scene. Jesus Christ would have been a challenge to any actor and a role very easy to overplay but von Sydow looked beyond the broad sweep of the character, beyond the mythology and reverence surrounding the most significant historical figure of the previous 2,000 years, and gave a subtly human performance. Centre only on that or the audience won’t see anything, because there’s too much.” You have to emphasize just what’s important in the line, and the same thing with character. If you have a line and you emphasize too many words the audience won’t get the meaning. The same thing is true in acting because you want to express everything, all the time. “If you are new to a sport, for example, you use too many muscles. “I think I have achieved through the years a certain simplicity and economy of expression,” he told an interviewer during the 1990s. “There are glimpses of Mr von Sydow, playing the role of Christ, that light the huge screen with revelation of the raptures and torments of a soul,” said the New York Times of a performance characteristically underplayed, tiny gestures and fleeting expressions conveying the psychological turmoil of his character yet still managing to touch cinemagoers right at the back of the theatre. Block and Christ might not have had much in common on the face of it, but what appealed to the Swedish actor was an opportunity to again explore what he’d brought to his disillusioned Crusader knight: a nuanced, deeply felt portrayal of tortuous inner conflict. ‘Iconic’ is an overused word but it’s justified when it comes to the monochrome image of Block and Death sitting either side of a chess board with a menacing sea beyond under a darkly cloudy sky, von Sydow’s gaunt features all shadow and light compared to the panstick white of Bengt Ekerot’s Grim Reaper.Īmong the offers he turned down were the title role in the 1962 Bond film Dr No and Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music, but finally, in 1965 he was offered a role he didn’t feel he could reject – Jesus Christ in the star-studded epic The Greatest Story Ever Told. That wasn’t enough to arrest a string of offers that continued to arrive as a result of a remarkable performance as Artemius Block, the 14th century knight returning from the Crusades questioning his faith, searching for the innate goodness of the human soul and playing chess with Death in an attempt to prolong his own life while saving those of his travelling companions. ![]()
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