German actor Udo Kier, who starred in 200 films, from Lars von Trier to Ace Ventura, has died at the age of 81. film

German actor Udo Kier, who appeared in 275 roles in Hollywood and European cinema, including multiple films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Gus van Sant and Lars von Trier, has died at the age of 81.

Kerr died Sunday morning, his partner Delbert McBride told Variety. The actor died in hospital in Palm Springs, California, his friend, photographer Michael Childers, announced on social media. The cause of death was not mentioned.

Known for his piercing gaze, Kerr often played villains, monsters, and creeps; He has portrayed vampires and Nazis several times. He has worked in films, television, music videos, and video games, and is sometimes classified as a character actor due to his consistently memorable roles across European cinema and Hollywood. “I like horror movies,” he once said, “because if you play small roles or guest roles in movies, it’s better to be a villain and scare people than to be the guy who works at the post office and goes home with his wife and kids. The audience will remember you more.”

Kerr was born Udo Kirsby in Germany in 1944; A few hours after his birth, the hospital was bombed and he had to be rescued from the rubble of the maternity ward with his mother. His childhood in post-war 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 didn’t have hot water until I was 17.”

As a teenager, Kerr worked in a factory in order to earn enough money “to get out of this misery I was born into”; At the age of 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 café. “I loved the attention, so I became an actor,” he once said. His breakout role was in the 1970 horror film Mark of the Devil.

Kerr has often described his career as shaped by chance. He sat on a plane next to Paul Morrissey, director Andy Warhol, who had chosen him for the role of Frankenstein in Flesh for Frankenstein in 1973, and then as Dracula in Blood for Dracula in 1974. He reunited with his friend Fassbinder and appeared in his films The Stationmaster’s Wife, Lola, The Third Generation, and Lili Marlene, as well as his miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz.

In the 1980s, he met the young Danish director von Trier, who cast him in his 1987 television production of Medea and began a collaboration that would span decades. Kerr, who was also godfather to von Trier’s son, has appeared in the director’s projects Epidemic, Europe, The Kingdom, Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, Melancholia and Nymphomaniac: Vol. secondly.

Van Sant, who liked Kerr’s performances in Frankenstein and Dracula, offered him his first American role in the 1991 film My Own Private Idaho. Madonna, a fan of My Own Private Idaho, played her swinging husband in her 1992 book Sex, and then in her music videos for Erotica and Deeper and Deeper. Kier has also appeared in music videos for Supertramp, Korn and Eve.

During the 1990s, Kerr continued to play small but memorable roles in several Hollywood films including Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Johnny Mnemonic, Armageddon, End of Days, and Blade.

Later in life, Kerr appeared in the S Craig Zahler films Brawl in Cell Block 99 and Dragged Across Concrete, and was the leading man in the 2022 comedy Swan Song, in which he played a smug retired hairdresser who escapes from a nursing home to do hair and makeup for a deceased former client.

“100 bad films, 50 you can watch with a glass of wine and 50 good films,” he once said of his prolific career.

Kerr’s last film was the political thriller The Secret Agent, in which he played a Jewish Holocaust survivor captured in the final years of the Brazilian military dictatorship. He will also appear in OD, the upcoming horror video game from Japanese author Hideo Kojima and producer Jordan Peele.