Adapted from a novel by Philip K Dick, the film was a neo-noir drama set in a dystopian future of giant
corporations, overcrowded cities and environmental ruin – the year was 2019 – in which replicants are
hunted down by special police known as Blade Runners.
Although it opened to mixed reviews, the film is now highly regarded, with studies devoted to its
examination of what it means to be human. The movie propelled the career of Hauer, whose square-jawed
figure, icy stare and droll humour helped to make him a staple of action and horror films, if never quite a
star.
He won a Golden Globe for best supporting actor for Escape from Sobibor, a 1987 TV movie about an
uprising at a Nazi death camp – he played the Jewish hero, against type – and in 2005 was a morally corrupt
Catholic cardinal in Sin City and a greedy Wayne Enterprises executive in Batman Begins.
Hauer also starred in the 1985 medieval fantasy Ladyhawke, alongside Matthew Broderick and Michelle
Pfeiffer; played a vampire king in the 1992 movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer; and ruled a supernatural tribe in
the HBO series True Blood.
But he remained indelibly linked with Roy Batty, the murderous Blade Runner replicant who is programmed
with a lifespan of four years. Hauer, wrote The New York Times, was “by far the most animated performer in
a film intentionally populated by automatons”, and “often upstaged” Ford’s hard-boiled detective, Rick
Deckard.
Rutger Oelsen Hauer was born in the Dutch town of Breukelen in 1944, and raised in nearby Amsterdam,
where his parents ran an acting school. He was performing onstage by five and ran away from home at 15 to
work on a freighter with the merchant marine.
With fellow actor Manu Wondratschek during
the shooting of Adrian Hoven’s ‘Pusteblume’ in
Berlin, 1974 (Getty)He began learning languages, ultimately mastering half a dozen, and after a year at sea returned to the
Netherlands to work as a carpenter, gardener and electrician. Night school didn’t suit him, nor did acting
school, and he dropped out to join the army. Once again, he said he felt bored and out of place.
“It was another one of those so-called macho scenes – I just didn’t fit in,” he said in 1981. “So I played the
sad soldier missing his mother and having problems adjusting, which was true – I was having problems
adjusting, so they discharged me from the army. Then I finally was more motivated and managed to do the
discipline thing.”
Hauer tried drama school again and came to describe acting as “the urge to, let’s say, fulfil a certain black
hole in you”. He worked in a rural touring company, performing plays by Samuel Beckett and Harold
Pinter, and was launched to Low Countries stardom in 1969 on the medieval television series Floris, a kind