Udo Kier, German actor who starred in art house and Hollywood movies alike, dies at 81

Udo Kier is pictured attending the Palm Springs International Film Awards in January 2025. (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

Udo Kier, the German actor who starred in both European art house and Hollywood movies, collaborating with some of the most significant artists of his time, died on Sunday at age 81, his partner, Delbert McBride, told Variety.

CNN has reached out to Kier’s agent for comment.

After rising to fame in cult horror movies in the mid-1970s, Kier made a prolific career of portraying villains with a distinct flair.

Over six decades, he amassed more than 250 credits, collaborating with some of the most celebrated filmmakers of his time — Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant and Werner Herzog — as well as other artists, like Madonna and Andy Warhol.

In later decades, he gained more mainstream attention with appearances in Hollywood movies such as “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.”

Kier was born in 1944 in Cologne, Germany during World War II, just hours before a bomb struck the hospital where he was born. He and his mother had to be rescued from the rubble, he told the Guardian in a 2002 interview.

As a teenager, he met his future collaborator Fassbinder in a bar, before either of them had achieved their subsequent fame. It was one of many chance encounters that propelled his career to its later heights.

When Kier moved to London as an 18-year-old, British singer Michael Sarne spotted him in a coffee shop and later cast him in his first role — as a gigolo in a short film. “I liked the attention, so I became an actor,” Kier told Variety in 2024.

Seven years later, he sat next to American director and Andy Warhol collaborator Paul Morrisey on a plane. “I didn’t know who he was. We got talking. I said I was an actor and showed him my photos, and he wrote down my number of the last page of his passport,” Kier told the Guardian.

Morrissey went on to cast him in his 1973 horror “Flesh for Frankenstein,” and then “Blood for Dracula” a year later.

Kier’s performance as Dracula turned him into a cult star. Shortly afterward, he reconnected with Fassbinder and the pair collaborated several times, including in the epic 15-hour mini-series “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” which depicts life in interwar Berlin.

In later life, Kier lived in Palm Springs, California, where he had a dog called Liza (named after Liza Minnelli) and a giant tortoise named Hans.

By Issy Ronald, CNN