Rutger Hauer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rutger Hauer
Rutger Hauer as Mr. Richard Earle in Batman Begins
Birth name	Rutger Oelsen Hauer
Born	January 23, 1944 (age 63) Breukelen, Netherlands
Other name(s)	The Dutch Paul Newman
Spouse(s)	Ineke ten Kate (1985 to date)
Official site	www.rutgerhauer.org
Notable roles	Eric Vonk in Turkish Delight Roy Batty in Blade Runner John Ryder in The Hitcher Cardinal Roark in Sin City

Rutger Oelsen Hauer (IPA: [rʏtxɛr ulsɛn hʌuɛr]) (born in Breukelen, January 23, 1944) is a Dutch film actor. He is well known for his role in Blade Runner (1982).

1 Background
2 Film career
- 2.1 Comeback
3 Other activities
4 Trivia
5 Selected filmography
6 External links

[edit] Background

Born in Breukelen, the Netherlands to drama teachers Arend and Teunke, Rutger Hauer grew up in Amsterdam. Since his parents were very occupied with their careers he and his three sisters (one older, two younger) were raised mostly by nannies. At the age of 15 Hauer ran off to sea and spent a year scrubbing decks aboard a freighter. Returning home, he worked as an electrician and a carpenter for three years while attending drama classes at night school. He went on to join an experimental acting troupe, which he stayed with for five years before getting the lead role in the very successful 1969 television series Floris, a Dutch Ivanhoe-like medieval action show, which made his name in the Netherlands.

[edit] Film career

His career changed course when director Paul Verhoeven cast him as the lead in Turkish Delight (1973) (based on the Jan Wolkers book of the same name). The movie found box-office favour abroad as well as at home and within two years, its star was invited to make his English language debut in the British film The Wilby Conspiracy (1975). Set in South Africa and starring Michael Caine and Sidney Poitier, the film was an action melodrama with a focus on apartheid. Hauer's supporting role, however, was hardly enough to establish him in Hollywood's eyes, and he returned to Dutch film making for several years. In this period he made Katie Tippel (1975), and worked again with Verhoeven on Soldier of Orange (1979), and Spetters (1980). Incidentally these two films also paired Hauer with fellow international Dutch actor Jeroen Krabbé.

It was in the Sylvester Stallone vehicle Nighthawks (1981) that Hauer finally made his American debut. Cast as a psychopathic, cold-blooded terrorist named Wulfgar, he made a strong impression, which was confirmed the following year by probably his most famous role, as the violent yet sensitive chief android Roy Batty (pitted against Harrison Ford) in Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi thriller, Blade Runner.

Hauer went on to be the adventurer courting Gene Hackman's daughter (Theresa Russell) in Nicolas Roeg's poorly received Eureka (1983), the investigative reporter opposite John Hurt in Sam Peckinpah's The Osterman Weekend (1983), and the knight paired with Michelle Pfeiffer in the medieval romance Ladyhawke (1985). He continued to make an impression on audiences, especially in The Hitcher (1986), in which he was the mysterious Hitchhiker intent on murdering C. Thomas Howell's lone motorist and anyone who crossed his path en route. At the height of his fame, he was even set to be cast as RoboCop in the film directed by old friend Verhoeven, although the role was re-cast to Peter Weller.

Italian director Ermanno Olmi mined the gentler, more mystic and soulful side of Hauer's personality in The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1989), the story of a lost soul who dies of drink in Paris while attempting to pay a debt of honour in a church. Phillip Noyce also attempted to capitalize, with far less success, on Hauer's spiritual qualities in the martial arts action adventure Blind Fury (1989). He returned to science fiction opposite Joan Chen with Salute of the Jugger (1990), in which he played a former champion in a post-apocalyptic world. He and Chen would again work together in two more science fiction films: Wedlock and Precious Find.

By the 1990s, Hauer was as well known for his humorous appearances in Guinness commercials as for his screen roles. It seemed that he had increasingly become involved in lower budget films, including Split Second, which was set in a flooded London after global warming, Omega Doom, another post-apocalyptic story in which he plays a soldier-robot, and recently New World Disorder, opposite Tara Fitzgerald. In between these lower budgeted films, he appeared in the music video "On a Night Like This" by Kylie Minogue. In the late 1980s and 1990s, as well as 2000, he also appeared in several British and American television productions, including Inside the Third Reich (as Albert Speer), Escape from Sobibor, Fatherland, Hostile Waters, Merlin, The 10th Kingdom, Smallville and Alias.

[edit] Comeback

Hauer has recently been on the comeback trail with small parts in big films, again playing villains in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2003), Sin City (2005), and Batman Begins (2005), as well as playing the Host in the British reality television documentary Shock Treatment (2005).

[edit] Other activities

Hauer is a dedicated environmentalist. He fought for the release of Greenpeace's co-founder, Paul Watson, who was convicted in 1994 for sinking an illegal Norwegian whaling vessel. Hauer has set up an AIDS research foundation called the Rutger Hauer Starfish Foundation. He married his second wife, Ineke, in 1985 (they have been together since 1968) and has one child, actress Aysha Hauer, who was born in 1966, and who made him a grandfather in 1988.

[edit] Trivia

Anne Rice has stated that when the movie Interview with the Vampire was being made, she originally wanted him to play the lead role as Lestat which eventually went to Tom Cruise.