Udo Kier, German actor who played eccentric villains and monsters, dies at 81

CALIFORNIA – Udo Kier, a German actor who played eccentric villains and bloodthirsty monsters over a six-decade career that included parts in films by directors Gus Van Sant and Lars von Trier, died on Nov 23 in Palm Springs, California. He was 81.

His death was confirmed by his management company, Richard Schwartz Management. No cause of death was given.

Kier’s trademark roles included Baron Frankenstein, a scientist who wants to create a master race of zombies, in Flesh For Frankenstein (1973); and Count Dracula in Blood For Dracula (1974).

In the United States, Kier was known for his role in American film-maker Van Sant’s film My Own Private Idaho (1991), in which he played a wealthy young man who engages in prostitution. The film stars Keanu Reeves and the late River Phoenix, and is considered a landmark film of the New Queer Cinema movement of the 1990s.

Kier was also in several films directed by Danish film-maker von Trier, including Manderlay (2005), which tells the fictional story of a 1930s Alabama plantation that still practised slavery, as well as the 2013 erotic art film Nymphomaniac.

Yet, he was equally at home in mainstream cinema, appearing in a string of Hollywood titles, including Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) and Blade (1998), often playing oddballs or otherworldly figures.

In addition, Kier appeared in US pop star Madonna’s music videos for her songs Erotica and Deeper And Deeper from her album Erotica (1992). He makes a cameo appearance in the first video, caressing the singer. In the second one, he delivers an opening line: “Beware. Our idols and demons will pursue us until we learn to let them go.”

Information on Kier’s survivors was not immediately available.

He was born in 1944 on Oct 14 in Cologne, Germany. The hospital was bombed shortly after his birth, but he and his mother, Thekla Kierspe, survived.

Kier grew up in poverty and worked in a factory until he had enough money to emigrate to England, he told The Guardian in 2002.

By 1966, he had moved to London to study English. Michael Sarne, a British singer and film director, approached him at a coffee shop and cast him for his first role, a male escort in the film The Road To Saint Tropez (1966).

Kier then starred in Mark Of The Devil (1970) as an apprentice witch hunter. The film shocked audiences for its extreme violence and foreshadowed the cynical and nefarious roles such as Baron Frankenstein and Count Dracula that would define Kier’s early career.

He appeared in more than 200 films and won numerous awards. They include the Special Teddy Award at the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival for his contributions to queer cinema, and the Best Actor award at the Dublin International Film Festival for his role in the film Swan Song (2021). In it, Kier plays a retired hairdresser who travels across an Ohio town to style a dead woman’s hair for her funeral.

In the Brazilian film The Secret Agent (2025), which was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May, he played a Jewish Holocaust survivor in Brazil who is mistaken for a Nazi fugitive.

“I don’t calculate it, but I want to do something in a movie which people will remember,” Kier said in an interview with Variety in 2024. “I’m not an actor who is happy to get a script and do exactly what is written. That would be boring.” NYTIMES