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 was 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 found that silly. Udo Kier had 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 was worse for him than triviality, which is quite remarkable in an industry so focused on the superficial. It’s also interesting that Kier could 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 combined 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 was 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 film business really. “Painting is more my thing. Film was not my world. It became my world,” he once told GQ. One of his best friends was David Hockney, Banksy came to visit once with his wife, and Kier’s house today is full of works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Sigmar Polke, Rosemarie Trockel, Robert Longo and, of course, David Hockney. Many of the pieces are accompanied by a note reading, “To Udo, with love.” The house is in Palm Springs. At first he went there only for the weekends, then he bought a small property, then another one. One of the houses is a former public library with a garden and pool; it consists of a single large room with glass doors and large windows. A giant turtle lives in the garden by the name of Han Solo, and every noon he shows up and gets a bowl of greens. Then Han Solo lets himself be stroked briefly on the head and disappears back in his burrow. In Udo Kier’s world, this, too, was perfectly normal.

And of course, you can immediately imagine Udo Kier as an Arne Jacobsen chair. With Kier, nothing was impossible. He also didn't know the meaning of the word “finished”. “You’re never finished,” he once told AD magazine, adding: “If I see something beautiful, for example a chair, then I exchange it. I don’t buy anything to make things look good. I live here, after all.”

Udo Kier celebrated one of his greatest achievements late in life. In the independent film Swan Song, he played the homosexual hairdresser Pat Pitsenbarger, who lives in a retirement home in the conservative town of Sandusky, Ohio, and is supposed to dress up his late friend, played by Linda Evans, for her funeral. They say it was the role of a lifetime, yet Kier was really just doing what he always did: combining his over-the-top performance with a frugal touch. In another interview with GQ, Kier said: “There I am dancing on a stage with a chandelier on my head. I don’t have to play that. That’s me!”