The German actor Udo Kier died this Sunday at the age of 81, as confirmed by his partner, Delbert McBride, and has announced the Amigo deDavid Hockney o Keith Haring, He participated in more than 200 cult titles, almost always in secondary characters. Paul Morrissey, Dario Argento, Gus van Sant, and, of course, were his teachers and Kier, his fetish actor.
In 2021 he signed his first leading role with Todd Stephens, which featured him in to play a colorful hairdresser who is brought out of retirement in a nursing home to restore a former client who has just died to her glory years.
He was born in Cologne, the son of a single mother and the only survivor (along with her newborn son) of an Allied bombing that destroyed the walls of the maternity ward where she had just given birth. He was a forced vegetarian—“because my mother could only give me soups, soups, soups,” he recalled in interviews. That is until 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,”
There they convinced him to dedicate himself to acting, “when the newspapers were talking about the new wave of cinema,” and he liked the attention. Also around then he met a young Fassbinder, 15, at a trucker’s bar and their friendship turned into collaboration and camaraderie.
Kier did not remember the scripts for the films he made, but he did remember the moments that led him to accept them. For example, when Van Sant, whom he met at the Berlin Festival, offered him to work on My private Idaho.“I thought that directors must feel very alone at festivals and that’s why they offer roles,” he told this newspaper in 2021. He was reminded of Alexander Payne’s tower of tuna with avocado that they ate together when he met him. And of John Carpenter, the milk he was putting in his coffee, in Musso & Frank, when he offered him for Cigarette Burns (The end of the world in 35mm).
The relationship with Von Trier was also forged at a festival, but in this case it was Kier who initiated the search. I had just seen The element of crime and decided that he had to meet him. They worked for more than 30 years together and he was godfather to their eldest daughter.
This same year, Kier appeared in The secret agent, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film for which actor Wagner Moura received the award for best actor in
