Udo Kier, German actor who starred in 200 films spanning Lars von Trier to Ace Ventura, dies aged 81 | Movies
German actor Udo Kier, who played 275 roles in Hollywood and European cinema, including many films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Gus Van Sant and Lars von Trier, died at the age of 81.
Kier died Sunday morning, her partner Delbert McBride told Variety. His friend, photographer Michael Childers, announced on social media that the actor died in the hospital in Palm Springs, California. No cause of death was stated.
Known for his piercing gaze, Kier often portrayed villains, monsters and reptiles; He has repeatedly portrayed vampires and Nazis. He has appeared in films, television, music videos, and video games, and is sometimes referred to as a character actor for his memorable turns in European cinema and Hollywood. “I like horror movies,” he once said, “because if you do cameo or guest roles in them, it’s better to be a bad guy and scare people than to be a guy who works at the post office and goes home to his wife and kids. The audience will remember you more.”
Kier was born Udo Kierspe in Germany in 1944; A few hours after he was born, the hospital was bombed and he and his mother had to be rescued from the rubble of the maternity ward. His childhood in post-war Germany was “horrible”, he told the Guardian in 2002: “When I was born my father was married and had three children and my mother didn’t know. So we grew up poor. We didn’t have hot water until I was 17.”
In his youth, Kier worked in a factory to earn enough money to “escape the misery I was born into”; At 16, he befriended future film director Fassbinder, then 15, over drinks in a working-class bar in Cologne. He was discovered in a cafe when he moved to London to learn English. “I liked the attention and became an actor,” he once said. His breakout role was in the 1970 horror film Mark of the Devil.
Kier often said that his career was shaped by chance. On the plane, he was seated next to Andy Warhol director Paul Morrissey, who cast him as Frankenstein in the 1973 film Flesh for Frankenstein and then as Dracula in the 1974 film Blood for Dracula. He reunited with his friend Fassbinder and starred in the films The Stationmaster’s Wife, Lola, The Third Generation and Lili Marleen, as well as the miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz.
In the 80s he met the young Danish provocative filmmaker Von Trier. Trier cast her in the TV production Medea in 1987, beginning a collaboration that spanned decades. Kier, who is also the godfather of von Trier’s son, is credited with the director’s roles in Epidemic, Europa, The Kingdom, Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, Melancholia and Nymphomaniac: Vol. II.
Van Sant, who liked Kier’s performances in Frankenstein and Dracula, offered her her first American role in the 1991 film My Own Private Idaho. Madonna, a fan of My Own Private Idaho, cast Kier as her swinging husband in her 1992 book Sex, and later starred in the music videos Erotica and Deeper and Deeper. Kier has also appeared in music videos by Supertramp, Korn and Eve.
During the 1990s, Kier continued to play small but memorable roles in many Hollywood films, including Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Johnny Mnemonic, Armageddon, End of Days and Blade.
Later in life, Kier starred in S Craig Zahler’s Brawl in Cell Block 99 and Dragged Across Concrete, and went on to star in the 2022 comedy Swan Song, playing an arrogant retired hairdresser who runs away from a care home to do the hair and makeup of a deceased former client.
Of his prolific career, he once said: “100 movies are bad, 50 can be watched with a glass of wine, and 50 are good.”
Kier’s last film was the political thriller Secret Agent, in which he played a Jewish Holocaust survivor during the final years of Brazil’s military dictatorship. He will also star in Japanese auteur Hideo Kojima and producer Jordan Peele’s upcoming horror video game OD.
