Udo Kier, the German actor who starred in each European art house and Hollywood movies, collaborating with a number of the most important artists of his time, died on Sunday at age 81, his companion, Delbert McBride, instructed Variety.
NCS has reached out to Kier’s agent for remark.
After rising to fame in cult horror movies in the mid-Seventies, Kier made a prolific profession of portraying villains with a definite aptitude.
Over six a long time, he amassed greater than 250 credit, collaborating with a number of the most celebrated filmmakers of his time — Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant and Werner Herzog — in addition to different artists, like Madonna and Andy Warhol.
In later a long time, he gained extra mainstream consideration with appearances in Hollywood movies equivalent to “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.”
Kier was born in 1944 in Cologne, Germany throughout World War II, simply hours earlier than a bomb struck the hospital the place he was born. He and his mom needed to be rescued from the rubble, he instructed the Guardian in a 2002 interview.
As a youngster, he met his future collaborator Fassbinder in a bar, earlier than both of them had achieved their subsequent fame. It was certainly one of many likelihood encounters that propelled his profession to its later heights.
When Kier moved to London as an 18-year-old, British singer Michael Sarne noticed him in a espresso store and later forged him in his first function — as a gigolo in a brief movie. “I liked the attention, so I became an actor,” Kier instructed Variety in 2024.
Seven years later, he sat subsequent to American director and Andy Warhol collaborator Paul Morrisey on a aircraft. “I didn’t know who he was. We got talking. I said I was an actor and showed him my photos, and he wrote down my number of the last page of his passport,” Kier instructed the Guardian.
Morrissey went on to forged him in his 1973 horror “Flesh for Frankenstein,” and then “Blood for Dracula” a yr later.
Kier’s efficiency as Dracula turned him right into a cult star. Shortly afterward, he reconnected with Fassbinder and the pair collaborated a number of occasions, together with in the epic 15-hour mini-series “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” which depicts life in interwar Berlin.
In later life, Kier lived in Palm Springs, California, the place he had a canine referred to as Liza (named after Liza Minnelli) and an enormous tortoise named Hans.