Udo Kier, actor of greater than 200 cult movies and pal of Andy Warhol, dies | Cinema: premieres and opinions | EUROtoday

The German actor Udo Kier died this Sunday on the age of 81, as confirmed by his associate, Delbert McBride, and the American journal has introduced Variety. Friend of Andy Warhol, David Hockney and Keith Haring, He participated in additional than 200 cult titles, virtually all the time in secondary characters. Paul Morrissey, Dario Argento, Gus van Sant, Lars von Triery, in fact, Rainer Werner Fassbinder had been his academics and Kier, his favourite actor.

In 2021 he signed his first main position with Todd Stephens, which featured him in Swan Song to play a colourful hairdresser who’s introduced out of retirement in a nursing residence to revive a former shopper who has simply died to her glory years.

He was born in Cologne, the son of a single mom and the one survivor (alongside along with her new child son) of an Allied bombing that destroyed the partitions of the maternity ward the place she had simply given delivery. He was a pressured vegetarian—“because my mother could only give me soups, soups, soups,” he recalled in interviews. That is till he was 17, when he went to England. “Not because I wanted to be an actor. What I wanted was to work in a Bayer-type company and travel the world,” he instructed EL PAÍS.

There they satisfied him to dedicate himself to performing, “when the newspapers were talking about the new wave of cinema,” and he appreciated the eye. Also round then he met a younger Fassbinder, 15, at a trucker’s bar and their friendship become collaboration and camaraderie.

Kier didn’t keep in mind the scripts for the movies he made, however he did keep in mind the moments that led him to simply accept them. For instance, when Van Sant, whom he met on the Berlin Festival, provided him to work on My non-public Idaho.“I thought that directors must feel very alone at festivals and that’s why they offer roles,” he instructed this newspaper in 2021. He was impressed with Alexander Payne’s tower of tuna with avocado that they ate collectively when he met him for An enormous life. And from John Carpenter, the milk he was placing in his espresso, at Musso & Frank, when he provided him for Cigarette Burns (The finish of the world in 35mm).

The relationship with Von Trier was additionally solid at a pageant, however on this case it was Kier who initiated the search. I had simply seen The factor of crime and determined that he needed to meet him. They labored for greater than 30 years collectively and he was godfather to their eldest daughter.

This identical 12 months, Kier appeared in The undercover agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s movie for which actor Wagner Moura obtained the very best actor award on the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.