Rutger Hauer

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Rutger Hauer
Birth name Rutger Oelsen Hauer
Born January 23 1944 (1944-01-23) (age 65)
Breukelen, Netherlands
Other name(s) The Dutch Paul Newman
Spouse(s) Ineke ten Kate (1985 to date)
Official site www.rutgerhauer.org

Rutger Oelsen Hauer (pronounced [rʏtxər ulsən hʌuər]) (born January 23, 1944) is a Dutch film actor. He is well known for his role in the cult film Blade Runner (1982). He won a Golden Globe Award for his role in Escape from Sobibor (1987).[1] In 2007 he published an autobiography, All Those Moments (HarperCollins; co-written with Patrick Quinlan), the title of which refers to his monologue in Blade Runner.[2]

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Hauer was born in Breukelen, Netherlands to drama teachers Arend and Teunke, and grew up in Amsterdam. Since his parents were very occupied with their careers he and his three sisters (one older, two younger) were raised mostly by nannies. At the age of 15 Hauer ran off to sea and spent a year scrubbing decks aboard a freighter. Returning home, he worked as an electrician and a carpenter for three years while attending drama classes at night school. He went on to join an experimental acting troupe, which he stayed with for five years before getting the lead role in the very successful 1969 television series Floris, a Dutch Ivanhoe-like medieval action show, which made his name in the Netherlands.

[edit] Film career

His career changed course when director Paul Verhoeven cast him as the lead in Turkish Delight (1973) (based on the Jan Wolkers book of the same name). The movie found box-office favour abroad as well as at home and within two years, its star was invited to make his English language debut in the British film The Wilby Conspiracy (1975). Set in South Africa and starring Michael Caine and Sidney Poitier, the film was an action melodrama with a focus on apartheid. Hauer's supporting role, however, was hardly enough to establish him in Hollywood's eyes, and he returned to Dutch film making for several years. In this period he made Katie Tippel (1975), and worked again with Verhoeven on Soldier of Orange (1979), and Spetters (1980). Incidentally these two films also paired Hauer with fellow international Dutch actor Jeroen Krabbé.

It was in the Sylvester Stallone vehicle Nighthawks (1981) that Hauer finally made his American debut. Cast as a psychopathic, cold-blooded terrorist named "Wolfgar" (after a character in Beowulf), he made a strong impression. This was confirmed the following year by his stand-out American movie role as the eccentric, violent, yet sensitive chief replicant Roy Batty (pitted against Harrison Ford) in Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi thriller, Blade Runner.

Hauer went on to be the adventurer courting Gene Hackman's daughter (Theresa Russell) in Nicolas Roeg's poorly received Eureka (1983), the investigative reporter opposite John Hurt in Sam Peckinpah's The Osterman Weekend (1983), the hardened Landsknecht mercenary Martin in Flesh & Blood (1985), and the knight paired with Michelle Pfeiffer in the Medieval romance Ladyhawke (1985). He continued to make an impression on audiences, especially in The Hitcher (1986), in which he was the mysterious Hitchhiker intent on murdering C. Thomas Howell's lone motorist and just about anyone else who crossed his path. At the height of his fame, he was even set to be cast as RoboCop in the film directed by old friend Verhoeven, although the role instead went to Peter Weller. That same year, however, Hauer starred as Nick Randall in Wanted: Dead or Alive as the descendant of the character played by Steve McQueen in the television series of the same name.

Italian director Ermanno Olmi mined the gentler, more mystic and soulful side of Hauer's personality in The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1989), the story of a lost soul who dies of drink in Paris while attempting to pay a debt of honour in a church. Phillip Noyce also attempted to capitalize, with far less success, on Hauer's spiritual qualities in the martial arts action adventure Blind Fury (1989). He returned to science fiction opposite Joan Chen with Salute of the Jugger (1990), in which he played a former champion in a post-apocalyptic world. He and Chen would again work together in two more science fiction films: Wedlock and Precious Find.

By the 1990s, Hauer was as well known for his humorous appearances in Guinness commercials as for his screen roles. It seemed that he had increasingly become involved in lower budget films, including Split Second, which was set in a flooded London after global warming, Omega Doom, another post-apocalyptic story in which he plays a soldier-robot, and recently New World Disorder, opposite Tara Fitzgerald. In between these lower budgeted films, he appeared in the music video "On a Night Like This" by Kylie Minogue. In the late 1980s and 1990s, as well as 2000, he also appeared in several British and American television productions, including Inside the Third Reich (as Albert Speer), Escape from Sobibor, Fatherland, Hostile Waters, Merlin, The 10th Kingdom, Smallville, Alias and ’Salem’s Lot.

[edit] Recent film work

Hauer has played villains in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2003), Sin City (2005), and Batman Begins (2005), as well as playing the Host in the British reality television documentary Shock Treatment (2005). He will also star in the horror film Pathology.

[edit] Other work

Hauer is a dedicated environmentalist. He fought for the release of Greenpeace's co-founder, Paul Watson, who was convicted in 1994 for sinking a Norwegian whaling vessel. Hauer has set up an AIDS awareness foundation called the Rutger Hauer Starfish Foundation. He married his second wife, Ineke, in 1985 (they have been together since 1968) and has one child, actress Aysha Hauer, who was born in 1966, and who made him a grandfather in 1988.

In April of 2007 he published his autobiography titled All Those Moments: Stories of Heroes, Villains, Replicants, and Blade Runners where he discusses many of his movie roles. Proceeds of the book go to Hauer's Starfish Foundation.

[edit] Filmography

Main article: Rutger Hauer filmography
Awards
Preceded by
Jan Niklas
for Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna 		Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television
1987
for Escape From Sobibor 		Succeeded by
Barry Bostwick
for War and Remembrance


[edit] References

  1. ^ Awards for Rutger Hauer. Internet Movie Database. Retrieved on 2007-05-24.
  2. ^ Todd Leopold. 'Blade Runner' actor on 'strange profession'. CNN.com. Retrieved on 2007-06-12.

[edit] External links

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