MAX VON SYDOW is 74 this week. He made his first film more than 50 years ago, but last year he was still squaring up strongly against Tom Cruise in Spielberg’s Minority Report. As Ingmar Bergman’s favoured actor he played chess with the Grim Reaper and bestrode the European art-houses; but he’s also played Jesus in Hollywood, fought the devil as The Exorcist and brought a comic-book übervillain to glorious life as Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon. Von Sydow has done it all.

We meet in the suite of a Cannes hotel and von Sydow is instantly charming. The lean 6ft 3in frame is a little bowed now, but the mind is not. He waxes lyrically about his new movie, Intacto, in which he plays the sole survivor of a concentration camp who, years later, is still proving his unreal good luck by taking on challengers at Russian roulette.

“You could call my character evil, but he isn’t. He feels that during the Holocaust his luck cost other people their lives. His feeling of guilt makes him a tragic figure. That really appealed to me.”

He had said that it was a relief not to be asked to play a priest. Was this a joke? “It’s a joke,” he says, “but it’s also terribly serious for me.” On the word “serious” he laughs.

“Look. I started my life working with Ingmar Bergman, who is considered a very serious person, and all the parts I played for him were serious guys; so consequently I must be also terribly serious. Then they cast me as Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told; so obviously I must be very religious.” He sighs. “So after that, I did the priest in The Exorcist and since then I’ve done priests, I’ve done bishops, I’ve done the Pope — mind you, that was fun, it was Clement VII, who was Pope during the sack of Rome — I’ve played St Peter and the Devil. I wish I could be considered just a normal person.” Like many European actors, he has found Hollywood a tad black and white when it comes to casting, but in his best Hollywood roles he has been superb: not least as a sombre, ethereal Jesus in George Stevens’s otherwise lamentable The Greatest Story Ever Told and as the stalwart Father Merrin in The Exorcist.

He remembers the biblical epic, which co-starred Charlton Heston, John Wayne and Telly Savalas and was his first Hollywood role, as “a very strange experience. For George Stevens it was a pilgrimage. He wanted to do the ultimate version of the life of Christ. It was his offering to the good Lord. And I am sure a lot of the American stars felt the same way. They took it awfully seriously. That got a bit scary,” he laughs, “particularly since I was playing Jesus.”

That was in 1965, by which time his work with Bergman had caught the attention of the Hollywood talent scouts. He had already turned down a number of parts, notably the title role in Dr No. “Of course I didn’t know what was to become of that film,” he smiles.

After studying at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre School, von Sydow cut his teeth in the theatre and had acted twice on stage for Bergman before appearing as the tormented knight — stalling for time at the chessboard — in the director’s The Seventh Seal in 1957. “I had been in other films, with other directors, but nothing was as exciting as that,” he recalls. “We knew that The Seventh Seal was kind of experimental, but of course we didn’t know it was going to become such a classic.”

It was the first of 11 films von Sydow made for Bergman, his gaunt, flaxen-haired features proving the perfect vessel for the potent gloom and strangeness of such films as The Magician, Through a Glass Darkly and Hour of the Wolf. Often depicting artists struggling against society or with their own demons, von Sydow can easily be seen as the director’s onscreen alter ego.

His only Oscar nomination, however, was for his moving portrayal of the ageing, poverty-stricken father in Bille August’s Pelle the Conqueror. He was memorable in The Quiller Memorandum and opposite Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor and played another tortured artist in the Bergman acolyte Woody Allen’s Hannah and her Sisters. But he shows as much satisfaction with Ming the Merciless. “I really enjoyed that film. I grew up reading Flash Gordon so it was sort of nostalgic for me.” And he laments not having been offered more comedies.

He certainly has reserves of drollery. I ask him why he changed his name: he was christened Karl Adolf, names which, like his surname, indicate his German ancestry.

“After the war Adolf was not a good name. And then when I got into theatre, people had trouble remembering the combination of Karl Adolf. So I thought I had to find something that people will remember and that sounds more artistic. When I was in the army we used to put on a revue, and I had a number with a fictitious flea called Max that could perform all kinds of tricks. This was a great success. After that evening the colonel always called me Max.”

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