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Max Von Sydow has Passed

marillion

marillion

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Max Von Sydow Passed at 90

Superlative actor in genre and outside it. Talk about someone who brought gravitas to just about any project he was on. My first experience with him was as a young child, seeing Flash Gordon in the theater. Then, of course, his turn as a maniacal brew master in Strange Brew, the Bob and Doug Mackenzie movie. He played everything from Jesus Christ to an ally to the Resistance. His presence will be missed. R.I.P. sir. Safe home...
 
:(
I actually haven't seen very many of his movies, but he was always very good in the ones I did see him in.
 
My jaw hit the ground when I was watching The Force Awakens and thought, "oh my God, that's Max von Sydow!" I felt that that was a casting coup on the level of casting Christopher Lee in the prequels. I was extremely disappointed that the whole purpose of his character was to simply be killed off in the first scene.

Oh! And he played master villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld opposite of Sean Connery in Never Say Never Again.

RIP, good sir. :(
 
He was in a lot of movies. Even "The Black Hole" (a surprisingly good curate's egg).

TLJ's worst scene by far is dispatching Snoke so quickly and without rhyme nor reason. Audience subversion or not, it can still be done with flair or finesse. (The idea itself is legitimately unexpected, but on screen it felt like too jarring and I do wonder if it could have been better. So did the escape scene from Canto Bight. I still do enjoy the movie but those moments are, yes, worse than Force-Pull Leia but by now I'd expect she'd have developed something. Maybe it's a bit much and other ways to set up the "angry kid kills mommy, who survived" trope. But three added ingredients don't spoil the stew.)
 
The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and The Exorcist, of course, are enough to be legendary. But he could make anything better. For a stretch in the late '70s and early '80s, he turned up in a lot of what I was seeing as a young film-goer.

Dune came out when I was 13, so of course my friends and I had great fun with the line "Urine and feces are processed in the thigh pads." But who could have done better?

Points for mentioning Strange Brew in the first post!

One line that has stuck in my mind for these 30-plus years:
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Cutie McWhiskers said:
He was in a lot of movies. Even "The Black Hole" (a surprisingly good curate's egg).
Click to expand...

He was? I missed that.
 
J.T.B. said:
The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and The Exorcist, of course, are enough to be legendary. But he could make anything better. For a stretch in the late '70s and early '80s, he turned up in a lot of what I was seeing as a young film-goer.

Dune came out when I was 13, so of course my friends and I had great fun with the line "Urine and feces are processed in the thigh pads." But who could have done better?

Points for mentioning Strange Brew in the first post!

One line that has stuck in my mind for these 30-plus years:
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For more detailed information, see our cookies page.



He was? I missed that.
Click to expand...

Oops. I clicked on the wrong IMDB link, which had his name mentioned... oops... but he's not anywhere else. :o Even the official trailer. :o:o

He was still a great actor!
 
One of the things I always liked about King Osric is what Max Von Sydow did with his voice. The weariness and breathlessness of old age coloring the fact that this man is still physically powerful (to a point). He sounded like my grandpa.
 
Greg Cox said:
Don't think he was in The Black Hole. You may be thinking of Maxmillian Schell.

As for Von Sydow, he's quite possibly the only actor to play Ming the Merciless, Blofeld, The Exorcist, The Devil . . . and Jesus Christ.
Click to expand...
I will commit sacrilege and admit I thought his Blofeld was almost as good as Savalas. Savalas had better material to work with. In a lot of ways his career reminds me of Christopher Lee's. Neither of them always got the best parts. Sometimes they did, but either way they always made it memorable.
 
I just looked him up on Wikipedia, and I was shocked to see how much stuff I'd actually seen him in.
 
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