Hungry for More: Udo Kier in Hollywood

“I guess I just like to work,” Udo Kier said once when he was asked whether his success was the result of discipline. It certainly is the understatement of the century, considering that the seventy-eight-year-old has made about 250 films in his long career (he doesn’t know for sure). There were at least fifty good ones, as Kier says himself. He is the only German actor in Hollywood who has worked with almost all the great directors of the past five decades – the likes of Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Gus Van Sant, Lars von Trier and Quentin Tarantino. He never asked a director for a role, as he points out. After all, you don’t have to tell a famous filmmaker that you want to work with them. He finds that silly. Udo Kier has a different method.

“The older I get, the better I am at choosing roles. It’s about whether I can leave my mark on a role. An impression,” he once said in an interview with Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung. That sums up Udo Kier pretty well. Nothing is worse for him than triviality, which is quite remarkable in an industry so focused on the superficial. It’s also interesting that Kier can really take the triviality out of any trivial role in any trivial production, no matter how lousy, not to mention the ridiculousness out of any ridiculous film fantasy, no matter how insane. To name a few examples, if only because listing them is such great fun:

Hard to say. Because Kier combines so many obscure life stories in one. Born Udo Kierspe on October 14, 1944, in Cologne, he grew up in relative poverty. His mother wanted him to learn something sensible, so he did an apprenticeship as a wholesale merchant. It was during this time that he met Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and the two teenagers would occasionally get together in a working-class bar in Cologne that was also frequented by people from the red-light milieu. Nobody could have guessed at the time what was going to become of the two of them. After his apprenticeship, Kier worked on the assembly line at Ford, and with the money he earned there he went to London to finally learn English. He would have liked to have done that earlier, but there hadn’t been enough money to send him to a good school.

In London – when he was nineteen – he was finally discovered and invited to shoot a short film in France. After that, the newspapers called Kier the “new face of cinema” and wrote that he was “the most beautiful man in the world”. A pretty meteoric career, you could say, but it gets even better. In London, he went to a nightclub frequented by celebrities – “just to have a look”, as he recalled. Kier drank a glass by himself. A waiter came up and said, “Mr. Visconti would like to invite you to have champagne with him and Mr. Nureyev.” Kier had never heard those names before. He told the waiter that the gentleman should come himself. The result is a photo of Udo Kier with Luchino Visconti, Rudolf Nureyev and Helmut Berger, who was also there that evening. Later Udo Kier moved to Rome. In 1973, on a flight to Munich, he met Paul Morrissey, who was making films for Andy Warhol. A few weeks later, he was offered the lead role in Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein. But his really big breakthrough came in 1991 with Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho alongside River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves. Of course, Kier didn’t audition there either. Van Sant flew to Berlin to interview him in person. As already mentioned, just one of these stories would be enough for one person. But with Kier, everything is always a bit larger than life.

About thirty years ago, Kier finally moved to the U.S. Not necessarily to become famous, but “to see how things work out”, as he put it. Los Angeles didn’t suit him, nor did the (…)

→ Read the whole interview in rampstyle #29.