Blade Runner co-star Rutger Hauer, who delivered famous ‘tears in the rain’ soliloquy, dead at 75
- Rutger Hauer became a global cult icon for his role as the scary yet thought-provoking humanoid android in the 1982 sci-fi classic ‘Blade Runner’
- Hauer starred in Dutch classics and Hollywood blockbusters as well as in a whole range of B-movies, in which he was mostly cast as the villain
Dutch film actor Rutger Hauer, who specialised in menacing roles, including a memorable turn as a murderous android in Blade Runner opposite Harrison Ford, has died. 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.”