German actor Udo Kier, one of the most magnetic and recognizable presences of European and North American cult cinema, has died at the age of 81. The news, confirmed by his partner, Delbert McBride, and reported by Variety, brings to an end a career as extensive as it is heterogeneous: more than two hundred titles, dozens of collaborations with key authors and a biography worthy of the films he starred in.
Throughout his life, Kier was a close friend of Andy Warhol, David Hockney or Keith Haring, artists with whom he shared an irreverent, provocative vision, deeply linked to the creative world of the seventies and eighties. In cinema, his figure was forever associated with directors such as Paul Morrissey, Dario Argento, Gus Van Sant, Lars von Trier and, above all, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who made him one of his fetish actors.
A cult actor who found his first major leading role at age 76
Although his career was filled with memorable supporting roles, in 2021 Kier landed his first starring role with Todd Stephens in the film Swan Song. There he played an eccentric hairdresser who leaves a nursing home to restore the luster of his recently deceased former client. His deeply human and flamboyant performance put the actor in the spotlight at an age when others had already left filming.
A background marked by war and a childhood of hardship
Kier was born in Cologne, the son of a single mother and sole survivor of an Allied bombing raid that destroyed the maternity ward where he had just come into the world. That childhood left an indelible mark. He himself recalled that he was a vegetarian “because my mother could only give me soups, soups and soups“.
At the age of 17, he left for England, not with the idea of becoming an actor, but with a completely different plan: “I’m going to be an actor.Not because I wanted to be an actor. What I wanted was to work in a Bayer-type company and travel the world. “. But his destiny changed radically when he began to be observed by agents and photographers at a time when “the newspapers were talking about the new wave of cinema“. The interest aroused by his looks and his mysterious aura finally convinced him.
In those early years he also met a teenage Fassbinder. The meeting was as casual as it was legendary: in a truckers’ bar, when the future filmmaker was only 15 years old. That friendship eventually developed into a fruitful artistic relationship that placed Kier in some of the most transgressive projects of the New German Cinema.
Memoirs of an actor who remembered sensations more than scripts.
Kier admitted that he rarely remembered the scripts of his films; what remained in his memory were the moments before he accepted a role. About his participation in Gus Van Sant’s My Private Idaho, he said, “I thought that directors must be very lonely at festivals and that’s why they offer roles.
He had a very different memory of Alexander Payne: the shared meal. “The tuna tower with avocado” was what stuck with him from
Her relationship with Lars von Trier also began at a festival, but this time it was Kier who decided to approach her after seeing The Element of Crime. That meeting marked the beginning of more than three decades of collaboration and friendship. Von Trier even went so far as to invite him to be godfather to his eldest daughter.
One last role at Cannes 2025
This same year, Kier returned to the screen in Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent. The film, which won Wagner Moura the award for best actor at the Cannes Film Festival 2025, once again demonstrated Kier’s talent, capable of providing a hypnotic presence even in brief appearances.
With his death, cinema loses an inimitable performer, owner of a gaze capable of oscillating between the disturbing, the poetic and the grotesque. Udo Kier was an actor who did not need big headlines to become immense: his presence was enough. His figure is linked to half a century of European and American cinema, to the counterculture and to some of the most radical creators of recent history.
His work lives on in each of these more than 200 titles, testimony to a career that never ceased to reinvent itself and which, as he himself said, was guided less by scripts than by the decisive moments that life offered him.
