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Rutger Hauer Filmography
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Rutger Hauer Resources
Rutger Hauer (born January 23, 1944, Breukelen, the Netherlands) is an international movie star.
The son of drama teachers Arend and Teunke, he grew up in Amsterdam but at age 15 ran away to the 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 as a swashbuckler in the 1969 television series Floris
, a Dutch Ivanhoe-like medieval action show.His career changed course when director Paul Verhoeven gave him 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 Wilby Conspiracy (1975). This film was set in South Africa and starred
Michael Caine and
Sidney Poitier, it 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 European film making for several years. In this period he made
Keetje Tippel (1975),and worked again with Verhoeven on Soldaat van Oranje
(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 he finally made his proper American debut. Cast as a psychotically cold-blooded terrorist named Wulfgar, he made a strong impression, which was confirmed by a major role the following year as the chief android Roy Batty (pitted against
Harrison Ford) in
Ridley Scott's science fiction film Blade Runner (1982).
He went on to be the adventurer courting
Gene Hackman's daughter (
Theresa Russell) in Nicholas 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 of the same name by old friend Verhoeven.
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. Philip Noyce too 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 fictions 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, 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.
He has recently been on the comeback trail as small parts in big films, with
Confessions of Dangerous Mind (2003) and the upcoming Batman Begins.
Outside of acting as an 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, and has set up an AIDS research foundation called the Rutger Hauer Starfish Foundation. He married his second wife, Ineke, in 1985, and they have a daughter.
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