The divine Rutger

Olympian amongst the trash

Rutger Hauer in ‘The Hitcher’ (1986)

It’s not difficult to pick out Rutger Hauer’s most famous moment as an actor; it’s the Bladerunner ‘Tears in the Rain’ speech. You know the one. The speech that Hauer’s replicant character of Roy Batty gives before dropping off forever. And from that speech there’s that inimitable line, ‘All these moments will be lost in time like tears in rain.’

Did you know that Hauer wrote that line himself? He added it to the end of the speech the night before filming; he played with the text and chopped it up and made it less florid. Note, for example, the absence of the definitive article; ‘tears in rain’ is more concise, more lyric, than its oft-cited form of ‘tears in the rain’.

It's always a matter of discussion and debate as to exactly how intelligent actors are. Hitchcock famously disparaged them as ‘cattle’. Personally, I’ve always found actors to be a pretty intelligent bunch, tho they've a strange kind of intelligence, the kind Jonny Carson evidenced when, after performing a rope trick on his show, he told Steve Martin that an act uses everything they’ve ever learned. Actors are their own product, and in order to get work they need for that product to be multifaceted. They also tend to in my experience to also be quite well-read, but they’re only ever bringing a small and unplanned amount of their existing knowledge to an individual role; it’s a bit like the football coach Marco Bielsa, with his huge range of background research about each individual opponent which he admits proves largely useless.

Rutger Hauer (1944-2019) always struck me as an unusually intellectual actor. It’s there in his approach to the Bladerunner speech, that he shortened it, simplified it, gave it its emotional hook. That he had enough ego lacking to know that less was more. Of course, Hauer was also always strikingly beautiful, regal even, so any brains he possessed might seem all the more impressive given that they functioned as a kind of career bonus. Yet there always seemed to be depths there, a sharp mind peering out of the monumental face, the ambient sense of a man of internal restlessness, with hang-ups, with a capacity to potentially set his life on fire out of principle. He also gurns quite a bit.

He was born in Utrecht during the German Occupation and his early life was peripatetic; he dropped out of school to join the navy and theatre school to join the army. His TV breakthrough was in Paul Verhoeven’s medieaval drama ‘Floris’ (1968) - I recommend a watch as the theme tune is boss - before he made his film debut first movie with Verhoeven again in ‘Turks Fruit’ (1973), a propulsive erotic drama. It’s a really good film.

It begins with an extended sequence of Hauer picking up women in ‘70’s Amsterdam, a carnal bonanza which includes Hauer vowing ‘Ik stik mijn pik in jouw’, probably comprehensible even to the non-Dutch speakers amongst you. It’s an indelible performance all-round, really, this great big Dutch bloke getting wanked off in cars, forcing food into his co-workers’ mouths, cycling wildly and exemplifying the radically self-gratifying spirit of ’68. The movie goes really heavy on the association of eroticism and death, and shots of rotting food and a general air of putrefication abound.

Hauer had a long and fruitful collaboration with Verhoeven; after an early TV collaboration, they did four films together, in true Dutch fashion falling out on the set of domestic megahit ‘Soldaat van Oranje’. Their first English language collaboration – and Verhoeven’s first overall – was ‘Flesh and Blood’, an Italian medieval epic. It’s a great, underrated little film in my view, and Verhoeven is a perfect fit for the bawdy medieval setting; as is Hauer, gazing over the castle ramparts as the mercenary leader of men. Hauer’s American period had actually started before Verhoeven’s, tho Verhoeven still wanted Hauer for ‘Robocop’ in 1987, which he didn’t get because he was too big for the Robocop suit. Hauer stood 6”1.

After Hauer became a 1980s icon, he was in quite a lot of crap. The crap got worse as he went along too; by the ‘90s it was all ‘Nostradamus’ and ‘Omega Doom’. (For a mid-period Hauer gem, try 1989's apocalyptic sports movie ‘Salute of the Jugger’, in which Hauer plays the team leader in the titular sport). Hauer himself said he’d only been brilliant in two or three films, one being ‘The Legend of the Holy Drinker’ (1988), tho in his case this assessment is less likely to be an actor’s false modesty and just a clear-eyed assessment of his oeuvre.

I’d argue that he elevated a lot of shit too, never more so than in his in my view masterpiece turn in ‘The Hitcher’ (1986). It’s a true B-movie, and on the face of it kind of thin – a driver picks up a hitcher who procced to stalks him relentlessly – but Hauer really does elevate it into something unforgettable. His intensity in the film aptly implies the titular hitcher as the Devil, or at least some kind of purely evil force; perhaps Hauer’s blonde hair and blue eyes inevitably suggest some kind of Aryan sadism, at the very least a fallen angel.

Plus that slightly weird accent, perhaps suggestive at that 1980’s high point of apartheid South Africa, gave him a further something exit. In these and other genre films, Hauer is bringing a decidedly non-American energy to American culture, which is of course the most American thing to do there is.

Towards the end, Hauer returned to his native Netherlands, with his turn in 2013’s ‘The Heineken Kidnapping’ winning the Rembrandt award. (Strange to name an acting award after a painter, but I suppose in Holland there’s only so much celebrity to go round). He started AIDs and environmental foundations and died of pancreatic cancer age 75. He’d married young and had a daughter, Ayesha, in his early twenties; his long second marriage produced no children. That all reads as quite spirit of ’68 to me too – the successful childless marriage, the straight guy with an AIDs foundation, those most peculiar Guinness ads. According to neighbours in Holland, he was fond of riding his horse around naked.

His last film role was in Jacques Audiard’s excellent and underseen ‘The Sisters’ Brothers’ – he plays the role of the villainous Commodore, and appears only in the end as a corpse in a casket. This seems admirably literal-minded, that the last shot of you in your movie career is you as a decomposing corpse.

Perhaps in some way Hauer didn’t get the roles, at least in the Anglophone world, that he merited; just being good at being the baddie didn’t make him only that, and his nickname as ‘The Dutch Paul Newman’ flattered neither. Yet Hauer seemed convulsed by rumbling internal conflict in a way Newman never was. He was way too antsy to be Robocop.

In recent years, I’ve grown mildly obsessed with Holland and Dutch-language culture. In my highfalutin moments, I conceive of as occupying a space between the astringency of the German and the populism of the English traditions – I am painting with very broad strokes - and Hauer incorporates that somehow, a species of intense and provocative iconoclasm, an unhinged commitment to pleasure; German expressionism played for laughs. Hence the gurning.

As an actor, Hauer’s beauty inevitably drew an association of decay; it was just too tempting not to make someone so angelic play a very bad guy. As a child I was in thrall to ‘80s genre movies, movies which took all sorts to make their worlds, and one of the strangest presences in them was Rutger Hauer, a totem of Western European Regietheater washed up in the wilds of science-fiction due to his world-class qualities of beauty and threat.