Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill actor Michael Madsen dies at 67

LOS ANGELES – American actor Michael Madsen, best known for his roles in director Quentin Tarantino’s films like Reservoir Dogs (1992) and the Kill Bill series (2003 and 2004), died at his home in Malibu, California, on July 3. He was 67.

The cause was cardiac arrest, said his manager Ron Smith.

Madsen never achieved true leading-man status like his soulmates Charles Bronson and James Gandolfini – but perhaps, measured by volume, he did. A tough guy’s tough guy, he seemed ubiquitous in his 1990s heyday, one of those guy-who-was-in-everything actors, like Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman.

Madsen’s Internet Movie Database entry cites 346 acting credits. By comparison, Bronson, a long-time marquee-topper known for star vehicles such as the Death Wish series (1974 to 2018), had 164 when he died in 2003 at 81.

With a whiff of Mickey Rourke, a hint of Sylvester Stallone and a linebacker’s physique, Madsen had the air of a timeless Hollywood bad guy who seemed to have stepped out of a 1940s film noir.

This point was abundantly clear to the actor himself.

“Maybe I was just born in the wrong era,” he said in a 2004 interview with British newspaper The Guardian. “I’m a bit of a throwback to the days of black-and-white movies. Those guys back then, they had a certain kind of directness about them. A lot of the screenplays, the plots were very simplistic – they gave rise to a type of antihero that maybe I suit better.”

If the role called for a sprinkle of sadism, Madsen was your man, as showcased in Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino’s breakout thriller about a crew of slick-suited thieves bungling a diamond heist in the bloodiest possible fashion. He was part of an ensemble cast that also included Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn and Steve Buscemi.

Few could forget – or sleep after seeing – Madsen’s flinch-inducing performance in the film as the very brunette Mr Blonde fiddling with a stereo knob, then strutting his way around a warehouse with a straight razor and a psychopath’s sangfroid to the sound of Stuck In The Middle With You (1972), a hit song by Scottish rock band Stealers Wheel, as he draws out the torture of a soon-to-be-earless kidnapped police officer.

As his career unfolded, Madsen remained in the Tarantino inner circle. He brought his thug gravitas to the director’s samurai-sword bloodbaths Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003) and Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004), as Budd, also known as Sidewinder, the honky-tonk strip club bouncer and former assassin whom American actress Uma Thurman’s own assassin character The Bride has vowed to kill.

In The Hateful Eight (2015), Tarantino’s sprawling western vengeance tale, he reunited with Roth and played Joe Gage, a gruff cowboy with a sartorial flair. Madsen also had a cameo in Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood (2019), the director’s movieland-meets-Manson tour de force.

Madsen received critical kudos for another outside-the-law performance: as the menacingly cool mob boss Sonny in the critically acclaimed mob film Donnie Brasco (1997). It was based on a true story about an undercover cop (Johnny Depp), who befriends a worn-down mob enforcer (Al Pacino) in order to infiltrate a crew in the Bonanno crime family.

In a 2008 interview with Film.com, Madsen expressed mixed feelings about being Hollywood’s default bone-breaker.

“When they want to put Michael Madsen in their movie because he’s done it before and you think he’s going to save your movie – then it’s a drag,” he said. “But if you’re surrounded by people who understand there’s a little more complexity to it than the pulling of a trigger, then it’s a real pleasure.”

Michael Madsen was born on Sept 25, 1957, in Chicago, one of three children of Calvin and Elaine (Melson) Madsen. His mother had worked as a film-maker and producer; his father was a firefighter.

One of his two sisters is American actress Virginia Madsen, 63. She received a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination for her performance alongside American actor Paul Giamatti in Sideways (2004), director Alexander Payne’s testament to the oenophile life.

In his early years, Michael Madsen worked as a mechanic and a paramedic, but his career path took a big turn in 1980, when he saw a production of Of Mice And Men, based on the John Steinbeck novel, by Chicago’s renowned Steppenwolf Theatre Company.

Enraptured by the performance of its star John Malkovich, Madsen tracked him down in the wings. “He asked for my address and said he’d send me a brochure for acting classes,” Madsen recalled in a 2016 interview with the British newspaper The Independent. “I thought he was just trying to get rid of me.”

Malkovich made good on the offer, and after Madsen took acting classes, he ended up with a role in a different Steppenwolf production of the same play, playing a ranch hand.

He soon turned to Hollywood, securing a role in computer thriller WarGames (1983), starring Matthew Broderick, and Racing With The Moon (1984), a coming-of-age story set during World War II, with Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage in starring roles.

Madsen stole scenes in director Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991), playing late actor Tom Baker, a swaggering poet friend of late singer Jim Morrison; and in Mulholland Falls (1996) as a tough-guy Los Angeles detective.

He stepped out of his brass-knuckles persona in the ground-breaking feminist road movie Thelma & Louise (1991), in which he brought “shades of Elvis Presley to the role of Louise’s once footloose and now devoted beau”, as film critic Janet Maslin wrote in a review in The New York Times. Louise was Susan Sarandon’s character. He did so again in the tenderhearted boy-meets-Orca film Free Willy (1993).

At times Madsen managed to secure the lead, as in Strength And Honour (2007), in which he played a wearied Irish boxer who has to dust off his gloves to pay for a heart operation for his son.

He also landed in more B-movies than he cared to mention. “You get these horrifying straight-to-video things for very little money,” he told The Guardian, “then you go to the Cannes Film Festival and they got some poster of you, 40 feet high, in the worst movie in the world. You’re like, ‘Oh, my God. Take the thing down!’”

In addition to his sister Virginia, his survivors include his third wife DeAnna Madsen; his children Christian, Max, Luke and Calvin Madsen; his mother; and another sister Cheryl Madsen. His son Hudson died at 26 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 2022.

Even in real life, Madsen had his rough side. In August 2024, he was arrested on a charge of misdemeanour domestic battery involving his wife. Charges were later dropped.

His on-screen persona also affected the way fans reacted to him on the street.

“I think people really fear me,” he said in a 2018 interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “But I’m not that guy. I’m just an actor. I’m a father, I’ve got seven children. I’m married, I’ve been married 20 years. When I’m not making a movie, I’m home, in pyjamas, watching The Rifleman on TV, hopefully with my 12-year-old making me a cheeseburger.

“I sure as hell had my rabble-rousing days,” he added, “but sooner or later you have to get over that and move on.” NYTIMES