Swedish actor Max von Sydow has been described as possessing a face fashioned by a medieval woodcarver for a cold Northern cathedral. Gaunt and lugubrious-looking, he played chess with Death in The Seventh Seal, the first of 11 films he made with fellow countryman Ingmar Bergman, and he was variously wracked by guilt and beset by religious doubt in nearly all the others.

"People see the Bergman films and assume that's the way Scandinavians are," says the sonorously voiced, abundantly silver-haired von Sydow, who was cast as Christ in his first Hollywood film, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and plays a character who may be the Devil in his latest, the forthcoming Needful Things. "But the Bergman world is very special. He came from a tough Lutheran family and obviously that coloured his perspective. My own experience was very different and religion hardly figured in my upbringing at all."

Von Sydow, known for his economy and restraint on-screen and his courtly manners and reserve off, was born on April 10, 1929, the only child of William von Sydow a professor of folklore at the Royal University of Lund in southern Sweden and his wife, Greta. He learnt most of what he knew about hellfire and damnation from his father's bedside stories about evil trolls and goblins who, in true Lutheran tradition, invariably got their comeuppance.

"We didn't go to church regularly and I never went to Sunday school, although my parents did send me to confirmation classes when I was 14. Both of my parents had been brought up in very orthodox Lutheran homes, particularly my father, but to such an extent that he rebelled against it and I grew up in a liberal home.

"As for the other cliché that people tend to have about Scandinavians, also partly from Bergman films I suspect, that they are somehow cold, that wasn't true of my parents either, although there was a certain formality about them. We used to spend the summers at my mother's family home and in the evening before everybody went to bed she would shake hands with her own brothers and sisters.

"My parents weren't very demonstrative—my father especially was quiet and had a great ability to isolate himself in his reading or writing and I didn't ever hear them quarrel. In fact, not having brothers and sisters to fight with, I grew up unused to any kind of outburst at all and when I first became interested in acting, it was a real problem for me. I didn't know how to tackle displays of emotion."

Von Sydow's earliest memories are of his first taste of ice-cream—"It wasn't often available back then," he says and his first trip to Stockholm, which was a day's train journey away. He was seven years old and the highlight of the two weeks he and his mother spent in the city was a visit to the toy department of the Swedish equivalent of Harrods. "It was torture because it was just too much. I couldn't make up my mind and ended up with a kite, I think, which I later regretted very much.

"Children get things so easily today," says von Sydow, who has two grown-up sons living in Sweden, "but I think childhood is also so much more complicated now. Television, in particular, forces an awareness of the world on to children, which we just didn't have when I was young."

At the end of the second world war, the Red Cross sent thousands of prisoners from the Nazi concentration camps to Sweden and many came to Lund, where they were housed in the town's public buildings. The teenage von Sydow was a member of a local folk dance group and he took part in performances for the former prisoners. "We learnt all the national anthems and it was a very emotional experience. I think we were the first ones who had tried to entertain them and some of them were very ill. Today you can see special sections in the cemetery in Lund for the ones who didn't survive."

Films and theatre played virtually no part in von Sydow's growing up. Living on the outskirts of the university town, he was several miles from the nearest cinema and he recalls seeing just two films with his father—the first was Max Reinhardt's now classic production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which starred Mickey Rooney as Puck, the second was Walt Disney's Snow White. When he was 15, a municipal theatre opened in the nearby city of Malmö and he immediately felt his life was changed for good. From then on he devoted himself to the amateur theatrical group he formed with a group of friends. "I was a very shy person and suddenly theatre gave me the chance to say and to live out all the things that were beyond me in real life."

The main obstacle to von Sydow becoming an actor was his father, who had hoped he would go to university to study law and follow in the footsteps of various relatives who had become judges. "Theatre just wasn't quite respectable to him, nor to my mother, I suppose."

Reassured by the fact that a former colleague from the University of Lund had recently become president of the Swedish National Theatre, von Sydow senior eventually agreed to his son attending the Royal Academy, an institution which numbered Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman among its alumni.

Recalling his theatrical debut in a small part as the Prince of Orange in Goethe's Egmont, von Sydow frowns at the memory of being required to come on stage and give a tongue-lashing to an older actor. "Unfortunately, he was one of my idols, a man I worshipped, and I had a hellish time making myself do it. Because of my upbringing, I suppose, it still felt like such a strange thing to do."