{"id":303497,"date":"2025-11-24T09:48:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-24T09:48:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/303497\/"},"modified":"2025-11-24T09:48:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-24T09:48:11","slug":"the-legendary-cult-actor-was-81","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/303497\/","title":{"rendered":"The legendary cult actor was 81"},"content":{"rendered":"

Udo Kier, one of the most beloved genre film stars of all time, has passed away at 81. The news was confirmed to the trades by his longtime partner, Delbert McBride. Throughout his more than fifty-year career, Kier appeared in more than two hundred films, many of them absolutely iconic. He\u2019s perhaps the only actor I can think of who seemed as at home in an Andy Warhol movie as in something like 1998\u2019s\u00a0Blade. He was beloved by fans of both the highbrow and lowbrow, and everything in between, and no matter what the role, Kier always embellished it with his own unique brand of gallows humour and total commitment.<\/p>\n

I vividly remember my first encounter with Udo Kier<\/a> in films. It was when I saw\u00a0Ace Ventura: Pet Detective<\/a>\u00a0at twelve years old, in which he played Ron Camp, a suspect in the kidnapping of the dolphin Snowflake. Over the years I\u2019d see him pop up in tons more films, including\u00a0Johnny Mnemonic,\u00a0Blade,\u00a0Armageddon,\u00a0Barb Wire, and\u00a0End of Days. It wasn\u2019t until I was in film school that I learned he also had a long career in avant-garde art films, including an association with Andy Warhol, who cast him in\u00a0Flesh for Frankenstein\u00a0and\u00a0Blood for Dracula, both of which were directed by Paul Morrissey. He worked with everyone from Dario Argento, to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, to Werner Herzog, to Lars von Trier (multiple times), to\u2014yes\u2014even Uwe Boll.<\/p>\n

I actually had numerous encounters with Kier over the course of my career, with him a frequent guest at the Fantasia Film Festival here in Montreal. He would often come out to party with the volunteers, staff, and journalists after screenings, but I never approached him as\u2014for some reason\u2014I expected him to be haughty. Yet, when I interviewed him around the time he made Alexander Payne\u2019s\u00a0Downsizing\u00a0and S. Craig Zahler\u2019s\u00a0Brawl in Cell Block 99, I discovered he was anything but. He was an extremely kind man who, just before our interview, was FaceTiming his dogs back home. He was extremely friendly, and every time I\u2019d ask him a question, he\u2019d ask one about me, and actually be legitimately interested in my answers. We hit it off so well he actually asked for my email address, although sadly, I never got an email.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, I always hoped I\u2019d be able to chat with him again. He had a great sense of humour about himself and loved his cult status, as well as his fans. He was one of a kind and will be missed. Lucky for us, we\u2019ve got one more cool role to see him in, with him appearing in Neon\u2019s\u00a0The Secret Agent, which is getting strong Oscar buzz. He certainly deserved to go out on a high note.<\/p>\n

\"JoBlo<\/p>\n

\n Subscribe to our weekly newsletter\n <\/p>\n

\n Get the latest movie and TV news, first looks, reviews, and interviews, straight from the JoBlo crew to your inbox. <\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Udo Kier, one of the most beloved genre film stars of all time, has passed away at 81.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":303498,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,75,136243],"class_list":{"0":"post-303497","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-udo-kier"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303497\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/303498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}