Max von Sydow has played chess with Death, duelled with James Bond and zapped entire galaxies with his evil moustache. He has portrayed both Jesus and the Devil, performed cinema's most notorious exorcism, and lent his lugubrious hangdog features to some of the most legendary directors in movie history. At 74 he can afford to relax, but it seems retirement is not an option.

"I don't get that many offers anymore," the actor admits, sitting on a sunny perch overlooking the Côte d'Azur in his adopted home of France. "Of course, the leading parts in films are very rarely of my age. Let's face it, the audience is a young audience and they don't care very much about elderly gentlemen. Every now and then there is a godfather, but the godfather parts are not that big. They sometimes die on page 15, but they might be interesting godfathers..."

He is being unduly modest here. Von Sydow continues to play major roles for high-profile directors—only last year he emerged with honour from Steven Spielberg's sci-fi blockbuster Minority Report. "Working with Spielberg, of course, is a great adventure," he nods. "He's a master, he knows the language of film so well and he gives the actors a lot of freedom."

Next week he is back on our screens in Intacto, a slick paranormal thriller by young Spanish writer-director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, in which he plays a sinister ringmaster of luck. It's a typical piece of von Sydow self-immersion: charmingly toxic, rich in sinister charisma. And no, he doesn't die on page 15. "I still get offers," he acknowledges. "If they are good, whether the directors are experienced or not, I take the risk. That's the gamble of the actor. But sometimes you're lucky."

Carl Adolf von Sydow began his acting career in 1955 at the municipal theatre at Malmö, near his hometown of Lund in southern Sweden. One of the directors was Ingmar Bergman, who gave him his breakthrough film role two years later as the chess-playing knight in The Seventh Seal. Von Sydow and Bergman drifted apart in the 1970s, although the star continued to act in the director's many screenplays. Thanks to such classics as Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring and Through a Glass Darkly, the pair will forever be linked.

"Sometimes I get sick of getting interviewed about Bergman," he admits. "I could be his press secretary, you see what I mean? That is kind of boring. But I don't want to get free of his artistic influence, ever. I'm sure I do things today, every now and then, that he could have told me to do. He has been extremely important to me, artistically and also as a friend; that's something I nourish."

When international success beckoned in the 1960s, von Sydow remained deeply attached to the Swedish stage and reluctant to take English-language roles. He resisted Hollywood for years, finally relenting after George Stevens offered him the role of Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told, in 1965. The shoot was supposed to last three months but ended up taking 18, and was not a happy experience. Von Sydow calls it "a very beautiful and a very moving failure."

His towering turn as Father Merrin in The Exorcist in 1974 was also fraught with tension. Although he was raised in the Lutheran faith and attended Lund's Cathedral School, the actor told director William Friedkin that he did not believe in God and could not accept the script. An angry Friedkin reminded him he had already played Jesus a decade before. "Yes," von Sydow replied, "but I played him as a man."

As middle-age approached, von Sydow became typecast in Hollywood as something of a rent-a-ham villain. When critics unflatteringly compared his Bergman roles with his comic-book tyrant Ming the Merciless in 1980's Flash Gordon remake, he simply quipped: "In Ingmar's movies, I never get to say 'prepare her for my pleasure.'" Three years later, Sean Connery invited him to play perhaps the most dapper Bond villain ever in Never Say Never Again. As always, even the most trashy supporting roles were elevated by von Sydow's natural gravitas.

But as midlife dawned, von Sydow reaffirmed his critical stature on the international arthouse stage. His highly regarded turn in Woody Allen's 1986 Oscar-winner Hannah and her Sisters, a nod to Allen's love of Bergman, gave him one of the meatiest dramatic roles of his latterday career. Hard on its heels came another excellent performance in the Danish drama Pelle the Conquerer, a moving period piece which earned him multiple festival awards and a prestigious Oscar nomination for Best Actor. "I knew I wouldn't get it," he shrugs, "but I was very flattered that I was nominated because it was a European film, in a non-English language, and this hadn't happened much before. Very rare, it's happened two or three times."

More awards greeted his courageous starring role as the controversial Norwegian author Knut Hamsun in Jan Troell's 1996 biopic, Hamsun, which the actor likens to his King Lear. Hamsun was a Nobel prize-winner who supported Hitler when the Nazis occupied Norway during the Second World War, a serious miscalculation that von Sydow characterizes as a mixture of naivety, stupidity and fear of British imperialism.

"It's a fascinating story about a man who does outrageous things, totally stupid things, but does it with a naivety which is sort of moving," he insists. Von Sydow spent the war in neutral Sweden but witnessed the terrible fall-out from nearby occupied Denmark. "He went along with Hitler and wrote things in the belief that he helped Norway. But he was stone deaf so he got the wrong information all the time. He couldn't listen to the radio and the newspapers were either the Norwegian ones, which were censored by the Germans, or the German ones, which were, of course, false."

Although von Sydow still accepts film work, in recent years he has wound down his long parallel career in the theatre. "The last time I was on the stage was 1994 and I'm not going to do it again," he says ruefully. "I loved it but I just don't want to get stuck for six months or more in one spot. Films give me a chance to work for two weeks somewhere and then have time off to be able to live and do other things. I've had a great life in the theatre, but enough is enough."

After a decade living in Rome, he settled in Paris in 1997 with second wife Catherine Brelet, a French documentary-maker. Although he maintains a summer house in Sweden, on the Baltic island of Gotland, he spends most of the year in France.

"I feel partly Swedish, but I guess I feel very international, too," he explains. "When you are away from your country for a long time you get another perspective on your country. Of course, I'm Swedish but now I live in France and I'm very happy here. I don't want to go back to Sweden. But, of course, a lot of Sweden is still in my heart."