New York (AP) — Dutch film actor Rutger Hauer, who specialized in menacing roles, including a memorable turn as a murderous android in “Blade Runner” opposite Harrison Ford, died last week. He was 75.
Hauer’s agent, Steve Kenis, said the actor died July 19 at his home in the Netherlands.
Hauer’s roles included a terrorist in “Nighthawks” with Sylvester Stallone, Cardinal Roark in “Sin City” and playing an evil corporate executive in “Batman Begins.” He was in the big-budget 1985 fantasy “Ladyhawke,” portrayed a menacing hitchhiker who’s picked up by a murderer in the Mojave Desert in “The Hitcher” and won a supporting-actor Golden Globe award in 1988 for “Escape from Sobibor.”
Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro in a tweet called Hauer “an intense, deep, genuine and magnetic actor that brought truth, power and beauty to his films.” Gene Simmons, the KISS bassist who starred opposite Hauer in “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” described his former co-star as “always a gentleman, kind and compassionate.”
In “Blade Runner,” Hauer played the murderous replicant Roy Batty on a desperate quest to prolong his artificially shortened life in post-apocalyptic, 21st-century Los Angeles.
In his dying, rain-soaked soliloquy, he looked back at his extraordinary existence. “All those moments will be lost in time. Like tears in rain. Time to die,” he said.
Hauer is survived by his wife of 50 years, Ineke ten Cate, and a daughter, actress Aysha Hauer, from a previous marriage.
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