Udo Kier, German actor who starred in 200 films spanning Lars von Trier to Ace Ventura, dies aged 81

Udo Kier, the German actor who appeared in 275 roles across Hollywood and European cinema, including multiple films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Gus Van Sant and Lars von Trier, has died aged 81. Kier died on Sunday morning, his partner Delbert McBride told Variety. The actor died in hospital in Palm Springs, California, his friend the photographer Michael Childers announced on social media. No cause of death was given. Related: Udo Kier: ‘I was so weak from eating only salad leaves to play Dracula I was in a wheelchair’ Known for his piercing stare, Kier frequently played villains, monsters and creeps; he portrayed vampires and Nazis multiple times. He acted in films, television, music videos and video games, and was sometimes labelled a character actor for his consistently memorable turns across European cinema and Hollywood. “I like horror films,” he once said, “because if you play small or guest parts in movies, it is better to be evil and scare people than be the guy who works in the post office and goes home to his wife and children. Audiences will remember you more.” Kier was born Udo Kierspe in Germany in 1944; just hours after he was born the hospital was bombed and he had to be rescued from the ruins of the maternity ward with his mother. His childhood in postwar Germany was “horrible”, he told the Guardian in 2002: “My father was already married with three children when I was born, and my mother didn’t know. So we grew up poor. We had no hot water until I was 17.” As a teenager Kier worked in a factory in order to make enough money to “get out of that misery I was born into”; at 16 he befriended future film director Fassbinder, then 15, while drinking in a working-class bar in Cologne. When he moved to London to study English he was discovered in a coffee shop. “I liked the attention, so I became an actor,” he once said. His breakout role was in the 1970 horror Mark of the Devil. Kier often described his career as being shaped by chance. He sat on a plane next to Andy Warhol’s director Paul Morrissey, who cast him as Frankenstein in 1973’s Flesh for Frankenstein, then Dracula in 1974’s Blood for Dracula. He reunited with his friend Fassbinder and appeared in his films The Stationmaster’s Wife, Lola, The Third Generation and Lili Marleen, as well as his miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz. In the 80s, he met the young provocative Danish film-maker Von Trier, who cast him in his 1987 TV production of Medea and started a collaboration that spanned decades. Kier, who was also godfather to Von Trier’s son, appeared in the director’s projects Epidemic, Europa, The Kingdom, Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, Melancholia and Nymphomaniac: Vol. II. Van Sant, who loved Kier’s performances in Frankenstein and Dracula, offered him his first American role in 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, then in her music videos for Erotica and Deeper and Deeper. Kier also appeared in music videos for Supertramp, Korn and Eve. Through the 1990s Kier went on 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 appeared in S Craig Zahler’s films Brawl in Cell Block 99 and Dragged Across Concrete, and was the leading man in the 2022 comedy Swan Song, playing a haughty retired hairdresser who escapes 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 movies you can see with a glass of wine and 50 movies are good.” Kier’s final film was the political thriller The Secret Agent, in which he played a Jewish Holocaust survivor caught in the final years of the Brazilian military dictatorship. He will also appear in OD, the upcoming horror video game by Japanese auteur Hideo Kojima and producer Jordan Peele.