Rutger Hauer, the pacifist Hollywood cast as its most frightening men

Rutger Hauer

Photo: DWDD / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 23, 1944 Breukelen, Netherlands
Died	July 19, 2019 (75)
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Batman Begins, Blade Runner, Sin City
Awards	Golden Globe · Golden Calf · Golden Calf Culture Prize · Rembrandt · Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion

Rutger Hauer once told an interviewer that violence frightened him. He had been born in the middle of a war, he explained, and it had given him deep roots in pacifism. He said this while Hollywood was paying him to play a terrorist loose in New York and a hitchhiker who murders anyone standing between him and a frightened young driver. The man who needed, in his words, to feel the Frisian clay under his feet became the blond menace of American posters. His most quoted scene runs only a few lines: a dying android sparing the man sent to kill him, and talking about tears in rain. Hauer rewrote it himself the night before the cameras rolled.

He was born in Breukelen, in the province of Utrecht, on 23 January 1944, with the Netherlands under German occupation. His parents, Arend Hauer and Teunke Mellema, were both actors and ran an acting school in Amsterdam; by his own account they cared more about their art than about their four children. A Rudolf Steiner school was supposed to protect his creativity. At 15 he left it for the merchant navy and spent a year at sea on a freighter, until colour blindness closed the road to a captain’s licence. He finished secondary school at night, left the Amsterdam theatre academy after a few months, and was trained by the army as a combat medic. He walked out of the service because he would not carry weapons built to kill, went back to drama school and graduated in 1967.

The screenwriter Gerard Soeteman, who was writing a television series about a medieval knight, saw him on stage with the Noorder Compagnie. Paul Verhoeven directed it, and Floris made Hauer famous across the Netherlands. The partnership that followed defined Dutch cinema for a decade. Turkish Delight, released in 1973 under its original title Turks fruit, was a raw, unashamed love story that earned an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film; in 1999 it was named the best Dutch film of the century, the same year the Dutch public named Hauer the actor of the century. With Verhoeven he also made Soldier of Orange and Spetters, both alongside Jeroen Krabbé. On the first, he met Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, the resistance hero whose memoir inspired the film, and who became the father figure Hauer never had at home.

Hollywood wanted the menace first. His American debut, Nighthawks in 1981, cast him as Wulfgar, a cold international terrorist hunted by Sylvester Stallone, and he hired an accent coach to stay in the country. A year later Ridley Scott gave him Roy Batty in Blade Runner, the replicant who crushes his creator’s skull and then, in the rain, refuses to let Harrison Ford‘s hunter fall. The screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples gave Batty a longer speech; Hauer cut most of it and added the closing line about moments lost in time, like tears in rain. It is the scene people quote when they say his name.

The rest of the decade alternated knights and killers. He was the cursed knight beside Michelle Pfeiffer in Richard Donner’s Ladyhawke and a brutal mercenary in Verhoeven’s first English-language film, Flesh and Blood. In The Hitcher, directed by Robert Harmon, he stalked C. Thomas Howell across the highways of West Texas; the film flopped on release and is now treated as a cult reference. In the television film Escape from Sobibor he played Alexander Pechersky, the Soviet officer who led the uprising in the Nazi extermination camp, and won a Golden Globe for it. Verhoeven considered him for RoboCop and passed, judging his frame too large to move inside the suit.

The standard account of his career calls everything after that a slide, and it is half right. The 1990s brought humorous Guinness commercials, the vampire king Lothos in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a long run of low-budget genre films. But the same account leaves out the role that best explained him. In Ermanno Olmi’s The Legend of the Holy Drinker, which won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1988, he played a homeless man in Paris trying to repay a debt to a saint, and the performance was all gentleness. It rarely appears in the summaries of his career. Hollywood had built a market for his threat and had no use for his tenderness, so the tenderness went to Italian and Dutch directors, and to television productions in Britain and Canada.

He never stopped working, and the new century brought a late second wind in supporting parts. Christopher Nolan cast him as the executive running Wayne Enterprises in Batman Begins, and in Sin City he was the corrupt Cardinal Roark. He took the title role in Hobo with a Shotgun and went home to play the brewer Freddy Heineken in The Heineken Kidnapping, which brought him the Rembrandt Award for best actor in 2012. Television audiences met him as the fairy prince Niall Brigant in True Blood between 2013 and 2014. In 2006 he founded the Rutger Hauer Film Factory to train young Dutch filmmakers, which earned him the Golden Calf Culture Prize two years later, and in 2013 he was made a knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion. One of his last screen appearances was a brief turn as the Commodore in Jacques Audiard’s The Sisters Brothers in 2018.

Off screen he kept the convictions he had brought from the army barracks. He sat on the advisory board of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and founded the Rutger Hauer Starfish Association to raise awareness about AIDS. With Patrick Quinlan he wrote the memoir All Those Moments, published in 2007. His first marriage, to the Swiss pianist and artist Heidi Merz, gave him a daughter, the actress Aysha Hauer. He met Ineke ten Cate in 1968 and married her in 1985, in private. He died of pancreatic cancer on 19 July 2019, aged 75, at his home in Beetsterzwaag, in Friesland, and his funeral was held privately.

The afterlife of the work keeps returning to the same few lines. Like Tears in Rain, a documentary directed by his goddaughter Sanna Fabery de Jonge and built from his own home movies, borrowed its title from the Batty speech. What the films around that speech argue is less tidy: an actor cast as a threat whose most lasting gesture on screen was an act of mercy, and who spent the second half of his life teaching young filmmakers rather than chasing a bigger part.