There were other late-career high points, including “Hamsun” (1997), in which Mr. von Sydow submerged himself in the tangled personality of the Nobel Prize-winning Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, whose age and ego led him to become a tool of the Nazis during World War II.

By his late 80s, cast in the brief role of the village elder Lor San Tekka in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and as the enigmatic seer Three Eyed Raven in Season Six of “Game of Thrones,” he was having, as the critic Terrence Rafferty wrote in The Atlantic in 2015, “the sort of late career that eminent movie actors tend to have, popping up for a scene or two in commercial stuff that needs a touch of gravity, and receiving, as famous old actors do, the honor of ‘last billing.’”

He was also treated to a fresh round of recognition. “For a significant portion of his six decades onscreen,” Mr. Rafferty wrote, “he has been the greatest actor alive.”

Mr. von Sydow received his second Oscar nomination, as supporting actor, in 2011 for his performance in the otherwise critically savaged “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” in which he played the mute companion of a boy whose father had died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. (In a wry handwritten note to the Academy expressing his gratitude, he wrote, “I don’t know what to say.”)

Perhaps no role was as emotionally charged for him as the one he played in the French-language film “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (2007): a frail, elderly man whose emotional defenses collapse when he learns that his son’s paralytic stroke is irreversible. The role reminded him of his relationship with his own father and of all the unresolved issues between them, he told The New York Times Magazine in 2008.