of Dutch twist on Ivanhoe.
The series was directed by Paul Verhoeven, who went on to cast Hauer in movies including Turkish Delight
(1973), an Oscar-nominated Dutch blockbuster, as well as Soldier of Orange (1977) and Spetters (1980),
which found some arthouse success in the US.
For his first American role, Hauer played a terrorist in the 1981 Sylvester Stallone thriller Nighthawks. One
month before the release of Blade Runner, he portrayed Nazi architect Albert Speer in the TV movie Inside
the Third Reich.
Hauer reunited with Verhoeven for the 1985 medieval drama Flesh and Blood; one year later, he played a
homicidal hitchhiker in The Hitcher and a bounty hunter in Wanted: Dead or Alive, an adaptation of the
Steve McQueen TV western.
He also made millions of dollars as the face of an advertising campaign for Guinness beer and starred as an
alcoholic homeless man in Italian director Ermanno Olmi’s The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1988), which
won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival.
Hauer poses in Rome during the photocall for
the film ‘Sights of Death’ in 2014 (AFP/Getty)But Hauer, who described himself as “a very nonviolent person”, soon returned to the menacing characters
that made him famous. He starred as an SS officer in the TV movie Fatherland (1994), was a vampire in the
TNT miniseries Salem’s Lot (2004, adapted from a Stephen King novel) and played a bloodthirsty
businessman in The Sisters Brothers (2018), a western starring John C Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix.
“It’s so much fun to playfully roam into the dark side of the soul and tease people,” Hauer said in 1987. “If
you try to work on human beings’ light side, that’s harder. What is good is hard. Most people try to be good
all their lives. So you have to work harder to make those characters interesting.”
His marriage to Heidi Merz ended in divorce, and in 1985 he married Ineke ten Kate, an artist. In addition
to his wife, survivors include a daughter from his first marriage.
Rutger Hauer, actor, born 23 January 1944, died 19 July 2019
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