#RIP: Remarkable Rutger Hauer set blueprint for complex villainy

Today, I was shocked to learn of the death -- at a surprisingly early 75 -- of Dutch character actor and occasional unconventional leading man, Rutger Hauer, who will probably forever be remembered for his haunting turn as the replicant (robot) Roy Batty in the seminal sci-fi classic Blade Runner, but he was and did so much more.

His career really took off in the 1970s when he became something of a muse for the iconoclastic director Paul Verhoeven. I must confess to not having seen many of their collaborations myself, they are hard to track down and unavailable on most streaming sites, but hopefully his passing will renew interest in those works.

I first became, and I suspect American audiences also became, first familiar with him from his villainous turn as the slippery terrorist Wulfgar in the underrated 1981 Sylvester Stallone thriller Nighthawks.

To say that he steals the movie from Stallone is an understatement. His cunning, charismatic but also stone cold killer really set the blueprint for a decades plus worth of genre villains (Alan Rickman's Die Hard performance owes a lot to Hauer, for instance). Before Hauer, a lot of movie baddies (especially in action films) were defined by either their brawn or their bluster.

Hauer provided neither. He had those incredibly blue piercing eyes, that soft purr of a voice and almost balletic physicality that disarmed you. And although most of his best films never found an audience until long after they left theaters -- he always made an impression on audiences.

In the '80s he flirting with mainstream movie stardom, in against type vehicles like the fantasy (a fan favorite for a lot of gen-Xers) and most compellingly as a horrifyingly mysterious monster in The Hitcher. That performance in that film, menacing and also bizarrely appealing, also is ripe for rediscovery. The 1986 film was a critical and commercial disaster when it first came out, but viewed today it has all the surreal terror of a classic David Lynch film. I've always felt this film was wildly under-appreciated.
Ladyhawke

The same goes for his goofy late 80s action film -- Blind Fury, in which, yes, he inexplicably plays a blind samurai. It's a silly, but totally fun little action romp, which demonstrated Hauer's flair for deadpan comedy. This one will always provide me fond memories, since I got to introduce a screening of it at my local Alamo Drafthouse.

In later years, despite his Blade Runner bonafides, he would by-and-large appear in B-movies or bit parts that we're up to his talents. Although, there was one last tour de force in the 2011 grindhouse action comedy Hobo with a Shotgun.

The movie is outrageously tasteless, gory, mean-spirited, silly and fun -- and Hauer plays his role with Shakespearean commitment and gravitas, making the whole enterprise that much more compelling. In a way, moreso than even Blade Runner, its the role that best illustrates the unorthodox arc of his career in America.

He almost never headlined a hit film and yet when he did they were hard to forget. They don't make many like him because he was in a class by himself. And even if I must admit that his career seemed to have slowed down considerably in recent years, I'm sad that there won't be one more career capper left for us to see.

His potential future work is lost to us now, like tears in the rain.