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The great Swedish film and stage actor Max von Sydow, passed away on March 8, 2020 at the age of 90.

Given the breadth of his acting versatility, it is little surprise that he will be remembered by different people for different roles: the title role in “The Exorcist,” Christ in “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” and his Oscar-nominated part as the slave-driven Lasse in “Pelle the Conqueror,” but his passport to cinema heaven will be his many remarkable performances under the direction of Ingmar Bergman.

The tall, gaunt and imposing blond Von Sydow, made his mark internationally in 1957 as the disillusioned 14th-century knight Antonius Block, in Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal.” As his profile steadily rose in Sweden, he would contine to constantly turn down offers to work outside the country. First approached at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival to act in American films, he refused the proposition, saying that he was “content in Sweden” and “had no intention of starting an international career”. When he turned down the titular roles of “ Dr No” (1962) and Captain von Trapp in “The Sound of Music” (1965), his resolve appeared immutable, but within a year he had shifted gears and changed direction.

As a child, my earliest recollection of the tall, gaunt and imposing blond was as a neo-Nazi aristocrat in “The Quiller Memorandum” (1966) opposite George Segal.

In Bille August’s “Pelle the Conqueror” (1987), which won the best foreign film Oscar, Von Sydow elegantly captured the simple grandeur of an illiterate widowed farmer who leaves a poverty-stricken Sweden for a Danish island with his nine-year-old son, only to find himself virtually a slave on a farm.

He would continue working for another thirty years, his last notable appearance as the Three-Eyed Raven in “Game of Thrones” ensuring a continued interest in his career from more than one generation of celluloid aficionados.