Actor: Max von Sydow

Max von Sydow made eleven films with Ingmar Bergman, beginning with The Seventh Seal, in which he plays chess with Death and asks questions the film does not answer. He was twenty-seven and made up to look older.

The Exorcist cast him as Father Merrin, again aged with makeup, and the character’s exhaustion is the counterweight to everything else in that film.

He worked internationally for six decades, from Flash Gordon to Minority Report to Game of Thrones, and was nominated twice, for Pelle the Conqueror and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the latter with no dialogue at all.

He held Swedish and later French citizenship and worked in at least four languages.