Max Von Sydow, Chairman of the Jury at this year's Prague International Film Festival, made his name in the films of Ingmar Bergman. But working in Hollywood, as he tells Geoffrey Macnab, didn't turn out as he expected

One of the more surprising sights in 1960s cinema is John Wayne in Roman centurion's sandals, toga and tin-pot helmet, standing by Hollywood's very own version of Mount Calvary, drawling out the immortal lines, "Truly, this man was the son of God!" as if ordering a drink in a Texas saloon.

The film in question is George Stevens' modestly titled The Greatest Story Ever Told and the screen Messiah dangling from a nearby crucifix is none other than Max Von Sydow, Chairman of the Jury at this year's Prague International Film Festival.

It is not difficult to work out why he was cast. Thanks to the success of such Bergman films as The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring, his brooding, angular physiognomy was already known to filmgoers the world over. He had a gravity, a spiritual dimension, that few Hollywood actors could match.

"Playing Jesus was in a way an impossible task," Von Sydow recalls. "It was my first part in a non-Swedish film. It didn't turn out at all how I expected." On the first day's shooting, he dutifully waded into the Colorado river to be baptised by a very hirsute-looking John The Baptist (Charlton Heston).

The extras, he remembers, were all true believers who regarded the picture as some sort of celluloid pilgrimage. "They did it because it was supposed to be the definitive life of Jesus on film." They treated him very strangely. "They expected me to be very dedicated on every level, which of course I wasn't. I was professionally dedicated, but that was all."

Von Sydow had been brought up in Sweden according to the Lutheran faith, but wasn't especially religious. Nor was he attuned to this style of all-star filmmaking. Audiences, he thinks, were distracted by the famous faces, everybody from Sidney Poitier to Telly Savalas, paraded before them. "Oh look, there's him and him and him. It was probably a very disorientating experience."

In many ways, the Stevens pic was a classic exercise in Hollywood compromise. The original script, by poet Carl Sandburg, was fascinating and provocative, but what finally ended up on screen was a colourful hotch-potch.

Von Sydow reckons Pasolini's Gospel According To St Matthew was the better film, but doesn't regret accepting the part. "It changed my life in various ways. It led to my later international career."

Nowadays, however, he confesses to a certain exasperation at so often being typecast as the saturnine Scandinavian. "They've seen me in Bergman films. They don't know me. They believe that's the only thing I can do - be a Bergman actor. His films are rather serious, rather dark, and they think that's the way I am too."

No, he doesn't think Bergman will ever be prised out of his self-imposed retirement. "The pressure was too high. Fanny and Alexander was very difficult for him. In many ways, it was a summing up, a final word. He just cannot stand the pressure because he's a perfectionist. He wants everything to be just the way he asked for it. Too often, there are unpleasant surprises and he just can't take it."

Despite the loss of such an important mentor, Von Sydow's screen career continues to flourish. He describes his recent role as Knut Hamsun in Jan Troell's biopic of the controversial Norwegian novelist as one of his most fulfilling.

"It's a very complex story about a very complex and strange man." For many years, the Norwegians were intensely embarrassed by Hamsun, a Nobel-prize winner born in 1859 who ended up collaborating with the Nazis during the Second World War.

The key to Hamsun's behaviour, Von Sydow believes, was his virulent dislike of the British. "Britain was very imperialistic. And he didn't like that. He saw what happened in the colonies in the late nineteenth century. Furthermore, he felt Britain threatened Norway as a seafaring nation." However naively, Hamsun believed that Hitler would act as a bulwark against the British territorial ambition.

He encouraged young Norwegians to welcome the Nazis.

Von Sydow's Hamsun is an old, deaf, but still unrepentant man, a sort of Norwegian literary equivalent to King Lear. The film opened recently in Scandinavia to brisk business and glowing reviews, but is yet to secure an international distributor.

At the moment, Von Sydow is "taking a bit of a sabbatical". Asked if he has any plans or returning to directing after the success of his Herman Bang adaptation, Katinka, he sighs and shakes his head. "It takes too much time and time is something I don't have. If it was 25 years earlier, I'm sure I would have tried "

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