Hauer’s homeland was too small for a big star
While it didn’t win him any awards, Rutger Hauer gave the performance of his career to get out of the army, so that he would be free to become a professional actor
It wouldn’t win him any awards but the young Dutch soldier was about to give the acting performance of his life. He had joined the army in 1962 after dropping out of acting school, but found he was bored by the discipline and the general culture of the military. Quitting was not really an option, not if he wanted to avoid doing time for desertion.
Instead he put on an act to convince his superiors he was mentally unfit for service and was dismissed from the army. That left him free to return to acting school, which was fortunate because ultimately Rutger Hauer would become known as one of the world’s best actors.
Hauer, who died this week at the age of 75, was best known for his performance in the cult 1982 film Blade Runner. In that movie he played Roy, a renegade replicant, a synthetic human with an in-built short lifespan who is looking for ways to prolong his life.
Just before his death he makes a poignant speech about mortality and all of the amazing things he had seen, saying: “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”
It was an improvised line that
could perhaps serve as the actor’s epitaph, except that our memories of him in his best films will be preserved for some time.
Hauer was born in the town
of Breukelen, in Utrecht in the Netherlands in 1944.
He had acting in his veins, his father Arend and mother Teunke (nee Mellema) were both actors and drama teachers. He grew up mostly in Amsterdam and made his first stage appearance at five, but it would be years before his professional debut.
Arend and Teunke left much of
the parenting to nannies but Hauer later said they were very modern, liberal parents who encouraged his artistic and intellectual development, sending him to a Steiner school.
But he quit at the age of 15 to run away and join the merchant navy. While it was a hard
life at sea, it gave him an opportunity to broaden his experience of the world as the ship travelled the oceans. He also picked up several languages, including English.
After a year he grew restless and returned home, taking up part-time acting classes, which he paid for by taking a series of different jobs during the day. He also developed a passion for motorbikes and cars.
In 1962 he went to study acting in Amsterdam but dropped out to join the army on a whim. He found out he hated it and faked his mental illness to get out and return to acting.
In the early ’60s he married Swiss pianist Heidi Merz. They had a daughter Aysha in 1966 but were divorced soon after. In 1967 he joined the travelling theatre group, Noorder Compagnie, whose mission was to take theatre to remote places. In 1968 he met artist Ineke ten Cate, who became his great love (they married in 1985).
In 1969 he landed a role in the Dutch historical TV action drama Floris, playing the knight Floris Van Roozemond, working with director Paul Verhoeven, who cast him in the 1973 Turkish Delight, giving him an international audience.
He made his first English language film, The Wilby Conspiracy, in 1975. Focusing on apartheid it was well received and hopes were high for his career to take off internationally, but Hollywood didn’t take much notice.
He returned to Dutch films. The 1977 film Soldier Of Orange, about an underground fighter during the World War II occupation of the Netherlands, resulted in international offers and he made plans to emigrate. In an interview in the late ’70s he was asked if he was going to leave he said: “Yeah, absolutely. Holland is a small country and I want to work with other directors … I want to stay a film actor and I have that opportunity. I can sit and wait in Holland but … I have to go abroad.”
When he went to the US they asked him to change his name, but full of youthful arrogance he told them he didn’t want to change his name for just one film. His confidence and his stand-offishness only made directors want him more. They offered him more money and allowed him to keep his name. His Hollywood debut came with Nighthawks in 1981, in which he played a urbane, well-dressed, ice-cold psychotic German terrorist named Heymar Reinhardt, alias Wulfgar.
The next year Blade Runner was released and while it was a box-office flop, it made Hauer a bigger star. He remained in demand since then, playing everything from villains to romantic leads, hardly refusing a role saying: “If I only do the films that I find interesting, I cannot exist as an actor.”
He is survived by his wife Ineke and his daughter Aysha, also an actor.
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