RUTGER HAUER Biography - Actors and Actresses

 
 

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RUTGER HAUER

Name: Rutger Oelsen Hauer                                                                 
Born: 23 January 1944 Breukelen, Netherlands                                               
                                                                                           
Rutger Oelsen Hauer (born January 23, 1944) is                                             
a Golden Globe-winning Dutch film actor. He is well known for his roles in Blade           
Runner, Escape from Sobibor and Batman Begins.                                             
                                                                                           
Hauer was born in Breukelen, Netherlands to drama teachers Arend and Teunke, and           
grew up in Amsterdam. Since his parents were very occupied with their careers,             
he and his three sisters (one older, two younger) were raised mostly by nannies.           
At the age of 15, Hauer ran off to 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 acting classes at night school. He went on to join an               
experimental troupe, with which he remained for five years before he was cast in           
the lead role in the very successful 1969 television series Floris, a Dutch               
Ivanhoe-like medieval action drama. The role made him famous in his native                 
country.                                                                                   
                                                                                           
Hauer's career changed course when director Paul Verhoeven cast him as 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 British film The           
Wilby Conspiracy (1975). Set in South Africa and starring Michael Caine and               
Sidney Poitier, the film 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 Dutch films for several years. During this           
period, he made Katie Tippel (1975) and worked again with Verhoeven on Soldier             
of Orange (1979), and Spetters (1980). These two films paired Hauer with fellow           
Dutch actor Jeroen Krabbe.                                                                 
                                                                                           
In the Sylvester Stallone vehicle Nighthawks (1981), Hauer finally made his               
American debut. Cast as a psychopathic and cold-blooded terrorist named "Wolfgar"         
(after a character in Beowulf), he made a strong impression. The following year,           
he appeared in his stand-out American movie role as the eccentric, violent, yet           
sensitive replicant Roy Batty in Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi thriller, Blade               
Runner.                                                                                   
                                                                                           
Hauer went on to play the adventurer courting Gene Hackman's daughter (Theresa             
Russell) in Nicolas Roeg's poorly received Eureka (1983); the investigative               
reporter opposite John Hurt in Sam Peckinpah's The Osterman Weekend (1983); the           
hardened Landsknecht mercenary Martin in Flesh & Blood (1985); and the knight             
paired with Michelle Pfeiffer in the Medieval romance Ladyhawke (1985). He                 
continued to make an impression on audiences in The Hitcher (1986), in which he           
was the mysterious Hitchhiker intent on murdering C. Thomas Howell's lone                 
motorist and anyone else who crossed his path. At the height of Hauer's fame, he           
was even set to be cast as RoboCop in the film directed by old friend Verhoeven,           
although the role ultimately went to Peter Weller. That same year, however,               
Hauer starred as Nick Randall in Wanted: Dead or Alive as the descendant of the           
character played by Steve McQueen in the television series of the same name.               
                                                                                           
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. Phillip Noyce also attempted to capitalize, with far less success, on           
Hauer's spiritual qualities in the martial arts action adventure Blind Fury (1989).       
Hauer 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 work together again in two more science fiction 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, which had increasingly involved low-budget           
films, including Split Second, which was set in a flooded London after global             
warming; Omega Doom, another post-apocalyptic story in which he plays a soldier-robot;     
and New World Disorder, opposite Tara Fitzgerald. He also appeared in the Kylie           
Minogue music video "On a Night Like This". In the late 1980s and 1990s, as well           
as in 2000, Hauer acted in several British and American television productions,           
including Inside the Third Reich (as Albert Speer); Escape from Sobibor;                   
Fatherland; Hostile Waters; Merlin; The 10th Kingdom; Smallville; Alias; and Salem's       
Lot.                                                                                       
                                                                                           
Hauer played an assassin in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2003), villians in           
Sin City (2005) and Batman Begins (2005), and the Host in the British reality             
television documentary Shock Treatment (2005). He is slated to appear in the               
horror film Pathology, and he recently starred in Goal! 2: Living the Dream...             
as Real Madrid coach Rudi Van Der Merwe.                                                   
                                                                                           
Hauer is a dedicated environmentalist. He fought for the release of Greenpeace's           
co-founder, Paul Watson, who was convicted in 1994 for sinking a Norwegian                 
whaling vessel. Hauer has also established an AIDS awareness foundation called             
the Rutger Hauer Starfish Foundation. He married his second wife, Ineke, in 1985           
(they had been together since 1968); and he has one child, actress Aysha Hauer,           
who was born in 1966 and who made him a grandfather in 1988.                               
                                                                                           
In April of 2007, he published his autobiography titled All Those Moments:                 
Stories of Heroes, Villains, Replicants, and Blade Runners (co-written with               
Patrick Quinlan) where he discusses many of his movie roles. Proceeds of the               
book go to Hauer's Starfish Foundation.