Filling the black hole of his soul
Rutger Hauer 1944 - 2019: Blade Runner's famous replicant dies at 75, writes Harrison Smith
Rutger Hauer, a rugged Dutch actor who played Nazis, action heroes and bloodsucking vampires, but who was best known as the android outlaw in the science-fiction thriller Blade Runner, died on July 19 at his home in Beetsterzwaag, a village in the Netherlands. He was 75.
His agent, Steve Kenis, confirmed the death but said he did not know the cause.
The blond-haired, blueeyed Hauer was scarcely known in the United States when he burst off the screen in the 1982 Blade Runner as a bioengineered android, or “replicant”, pursued by Harrison Ford.
Directed by Ridley Scott and adapted from a novel by Philip K. Dick, the film was a neonoir 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 regarded as a classic, with lengthy 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 make him a staple of action and horror films, if never quite a star.
He won a Golden Globe for best
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 life span of four years. Hauer, wrote New York Times movie critic Janet Maslin, was “by far the most animated performer in a film intentionally populated by automatons” and “often upstaged” Ford’s hardboiled detective, Rick Deckard.
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” Batty tells Deckard at the climax of the film, realising he is about to die. “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannha¨user Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
In a 2017 interview with the British magazine Radio Times, Hauer said he edited the monologue himself, paring down what he described as “overwritten” material from the screenwriters and adding the line about “tears in rain”.
“For the end line I was hoping to come up with one line where Roy, because he understands he has very little time, expresses one bit of the DNA of life that he’s felt,” Hauer said.
“How much he liked it. Only one life.”
Rutger Oelsen Hauer was born in the Dutch town of Breukelen on January 23, 1944, and raised in nearby Amsterdam, where his parents ran an
acting school. He was performing on stage by 5 and ran away from home at 15 to work on a freighter with the merchant marine.
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 socalled macho scenes — I just didn’t fit in,” he told the Times in 1981.
Hauer tried drama school again and came to describe acting as “the urge to, let’s say, fulfill 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 of Dutch twist on
Ivanhoe.
After a variety of film roles Hauer 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.
For years, he split his time between a potato farm in Holland and a 52-foot sailboat, the Marius, which he anchored off the coast of Los Angeles.
His marriage to Heidi Merz ended in divorce, and in 1985 he married Ineke ten Kate, an artist. Survivors include his wife and a daughter from his first marriage, Aysha Hauer.
“It’s so much fun to playfully roam into the dark side of the soul and tease people,” Hauer told AP 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.”