With his angular features and ice-blue eyes, German actor Udo Kier’s face was unmistakable. In over 200 films, he played everything from Adolf Hitler to monsters and vampires. With a repertoire ranging from high-end pulp to art house films and blockbusters, he frequently starred alongside Hollywood greats.
Kier enjoyed widespread acclaim for his leading role in the 2021 film “Swan Song,” in which he played Pat, a gay hairdresser living in a nursing home who gives his all for one last important job.
Friendship with Lars von Trier
Kier had a close working relationship with Danish director Lars von Trier. They collaborated for the first time in 1988 on the iron age epic “Medea,” and Kier was later involved in von Trier’s hit productions “Melancholia” (2011) and “Nymphomaniac” (2013).
The Dane so trusted Kier that the actor was allegedly able to choose any role from a script. He most often went for characters that evoked humor, Kier told German newsmagazine Der Spiegel in 2014.
A lucky man
Kier once said that luck was to thank for his acting career — and the fact that he even survived his infancy.
Kier and his mother were buried under rubble in a World War II bombing raid shortly after he was born in Cologne in 1944. Miraculously, his mother was able to free them both from the wreckage.
After leaving school, Kier trained as a wholesale clerk and then worked on the assembly line at car manufacturer Ford.
With the money he earned, Kier decided to fly to London, where he met Italian director Luchino Visconti and actor Helmut Berger in a bar — his first contacts in the film industry.
In 1966, Kier made his first film appearance in the British comedy “Road to St. Tropez” as a heartthrob seducer. He became much better known in the early 1970s with lead roles in the cult Andy Warhol horror films “Blood for Dracula” and “Flesh For Frankenstein.”
Work with Fassbinder
In Germany, Kier worked closely with director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with whom he was also friends and lived with for a time in Munich. Together they made the crime miniseries “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1980) and the feature film “Lili Marleen” (1981), among others. Fassbinder’s sudden death in 1982 affected Kier deeply.
In the 1980s, Kier frequently worked with Christoph Schlingensief. In 1986, he appeared in Schlingensief’s “Egomania: Island Without Hope,” and in 1996, he played a gay UN general in Africa in “United Trash.”
His breakthrough in Hollywood came in 1991 with “My Own Private Idaho,” a film about the lives of two hustlers, Mike (River Phoenix) and Scott (Keanu Reeves).
Director Gus Van Sant approached Kier in Berlin. The actor once explained that he generally did not ask directors for roles himself.
Kier is also known for the diversity of his film roles, from the lead in the 1998 blockbuster superhero film “Blade” to the 2012 appearance in “Iron Sky” — a low-budget pulp film about Nazis who colonize the dark side of the moon.
Patron of the arts
Kier’s other passion was art, having grown up in Cologne when artists Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter and Rosemarie Trockel were on the rise. David Hockney was one of his best friends.
Kier was one of the few people to know the anonymous street artist Banksy personally. At his home in Palm Springs, California, he collected works by Joseph Beuys, Peter Lindbergh and Wolfgang Tillmans — some with the dedication “For Udo.”
But he also collected cheap paintings simply because he liked them. The documentary “Arteholic” (2014, directed by Hermann Vaske) was a cinematic monument to Kier as a great art lover, portraying him in encounters with works of art and artists, including Trockel and Jonathan Meese.
Old age, new narratives
Kier worked well into his old age. In 2020, he made the series “Hunters” with Al Pacino, and in 2021, the fantasy horror thriller “The Blazing World.” The following year, he shot “AEIOU — A Quick Alphabet of Love” with his good friend, director Nicolette Krebitz.
Even at almost 80 years old, Kier was open to new narrative forms, playing a character in the upcoming video game “OD” by Hideo Kojima, which explores the boundaries between film and gaming. In 2025, he appeared in Kleber Mendonca Filho’s neo-noir thriller, “The Secret Agent.”
Kier died on November 23 at the age of 81 in a hospital in Palm Springs, California.
This article was originally written in German.
