Verne Troyer: Short actor famous for playing Mini-Me in Austin Powers films 1969-2018
● Verne Troyer, who has died in hospital in Los Angeles at the age of 49, was the diminutive actor best known for playing Mini-Me in the Austin Powers spy spoofs.
Mini-Me first appeared as an eighth-size clone of Dr Evil (played by Mike Myers) in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999). The character spoke few words, but was the subject of several gratuitous visual gags — including being flushed down a toilet and into space.
It was a box-office hit, with Troyer — who never had an acting lesson in his life — and Myers sharing the following year’s MTV Movie Award for best on-screen duo. Troyer reprised the role three years later in Austin Powers in Goldmember.
Troyer was born into an Amish community at Sturgis, Michigan, one of three children. He was still a child when his parents left the Amish or “jumped the fence”, as his father put it. He would later reminisce nostalgically on their simpler life, though he admitted that he could not cope without a phone or computer.
Born with cartilage-hair hypoplasia, a bone disorder that leads to dwarfism,
Troyer stood 81cm high. Nevertheless, he was always included in family activities. “I had to do everything my brother and sister had to do, including raising our animal menagerie,” he said.
At Centreville high school , Michigan, he was bullied. “There was a kid [who] called me the Mword,” he told Oprah Winfrey. “That’s just derogatory slang — the proper thing to say is either little person or dwarf.
“So I basically jumped up, punched him in the nose and his nose started bleeding.”
Troyer’s acting break came in his 20s with a job as a stunt double for a nine-month-old baby.
He insisted his height had never been a disadvantage. Asked about it, he said: “This is normal for me. It’s you guys who are abnormal.”