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, has died. He was 75.
Hauer’s agent, Steve Kenis, says 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.
“He was always a gentleman, kind and compassionate. Sending our condolences and prayers to his family, friends and fans,” Gene Simmons, the KISS bassist who starred opposite Hauer in Wanted: Dead or Alive, wrote on Twitter.
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.