Udo Kier, German Actor And Cult Favorite, Is Basking On His 80th Birthday

Hidden behind a strip of gay bars in downtown Palm Springs, an unmarked door opens into a modern-day speakeasy called The Evening Citizen. The walls are black, with dark velvet accents, and the lighting is low, except for a spotlight behind the bar that shines on the portrait of a man who could be the devil, or Dracula, or Hitler.

In fact, German actor Udo Kier — whose face glowers down from the wall — has played every one of those monsters, plus innumerable other villains, in a career that spans more than 200 film credits. Of his work, he estimates “100 movies are bad, 50 movies you can see with a glass of wine and 50 movies are good.” How many actors can claim that many good ones?

Kier has just turned 80, and he’s chosen this haunt to celebrate with a small group of intimates. He may look like some kind of satanic mobster in that photo, yet his guests (including three couples whose weddings he officiated) know his secret: Udo is a total sweetheart.

He’s also a bit of a diva, but that comes with the territory. What else would you expect from a cult superstar — in the Andy Warhol sense — who’s collaborated with everyone from Gus Van Sant to Lars von Trier, Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Madonna? (That’s him playing the singer’s swinging husband in her scandalous 1992 “Sex” book.)

I entered Kier’s orbit a decade ago at the Palm Springs Film Festival, where the openly gay, unapologetically camp actor is a fixture. He’s not just the chicest presence at the event’s tacky opening gala, but a voraciously curious moviegoer throughout the week. Kier has worked with directors the world over, preferring international cinema to Hollywood fare — though you might recognize the actor with the piercing, pale blue eyes from such studio hits as “Armageddon,” “Blade” and “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.”

Every year, Kier invites visiting filmmakers over to his house, a former public library that he has converted into a minimalist abode. In 2014, I tagged along, soaking up stories from a sharp-witted underground icon who vividly recalls encounters with some of the 20th century’s most transgressive artists, many of whom blazed brilliantly but flamed out early. Those who remain are reclusive, making his memories all the more tantalizing.

Kier’s home is a tangible compendium of a life lived among these iconoclasts. His art collection includes a leather jacket hand-decorated by Keith Haring, a sketch (of Kier) by David Hockney, a photo (of Kier) by Robert Mapplethorpe and a copy of Interview magazine signed by Warhol on every page.

Anytime I’m in town, I check in on Kier, who still works regularly — most recently in Brazil, where “Bacurau” director Kleber Mendonça Filho created a role for him in “The Secret Agent.” This year, he traveled to Syria to shoot “OD,” an interactive horror hybrid co-written by Jordan Peele and video game legend Hideo Kojima. Such risks are right up Kier’s alley.

When not on set, Kier’s days in Palm Springs are divided between gardening and scouring thrift stores for designer ties. He also has a dog named Liza and a giant tortoise called Hans. And then there’s Max von Sydow, a (life-size plastic) horse he keeps at his ranch in Morongo.

The oasis has a history of attracting Hollywood royalty like Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe. Those celebrities migrated to Palm Springs to avoid being noticed, whereas Kier craves the attention, relishing the big-fish-small-pond dynamic he doesn’t get in Los Angeles. If we’re out for a meal and someone recognizes him, I watch him turn on the charm, regaling his audience in his wicked German accent.

On the day of Kier’s 80th, I drive out to the desert to talk to him about his career — namely, how he parlayed roles in early Eurotrash movies (films like “Spermula” and “Doctor Jekyll and His Women” that pushed the envelope on sex and gore) into such a sui generis body of work. It’s an improbable journey that began in wartime Cologne, where Kier was nearly crushed to death in the maternity ward when a bomb brought the hospital walls down around him.

When he was 16, he met Fassbinder (a few months his junior, still new to town) in a working-class bar frequented by taxi drivers and cross-dressers. Back then, neither of them was remotely connected to acting or cinema, and since both were still minors, they would get kicked out at 10 p.m. “Just when it became interesting!” Kier says.

Kier actually flew “home” twice last month: to accept a lifetime achievement award from the Cologne Film Festival and for the opening of a career-spanning exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, featuring props, posters and even the sherbert-green costume he wore in “Swan Song.”

On opening night, the museum screened a new doc, “Der wunderbare Udo Kier,” along with “Staging Death,” a 2002 short film by Jan Soldat that assembles all the ways the adventurous actor has been disintegrated, dismembered or otherwise dispatched. “I die 69 times in 10 minutes,” says Kier, who found the montage too macabre to sit through. That’s one perk of playing so many bad guys: They die in style. (In John Carpenter’s “Cigarette Burns,” he feeds his intestines through a film projector.)

More impressive still, “I am the only actor to be born on-screen,” says Kier, and while that isn’t exactly true, no full-sized actor has burst forth from the womb more flamboyantly than Kier does in von Trier’s “The Kingdom” miniseries — just one of 10 projects the pair have done together.

“I have never asked a director, ‘I would like to work with you,’” says Kier. And yet the roles have come to him. It all started in London, where he relocated at age 18.

“And then I began to meet people,” Kier says coyly, recalling the night Luchino Visconti spotted him at Danny La Rue’s, a trendy London nightclub. The Italian director invited Kier to sip Champagne with ballet legend Rudolf Nureyev.

“What can I say?” he shrugs. “I was a very photogenic boy.”

The actor’s cheekbones are still sharp, his gaze unsettling. It’s easy to see how stunning he must have been six decades earlier, so much so that people would proposition him in the street.

“That’s how I got discovered,” he says, describing how Michael Sarne (a popular British singer who went on to direct “Myra Breckinridge”) approached him at a London coffee bar — nothing sketchy, but ultimately life-changing.

“I liked the attention, so I became an actor,” says Kier, who traveled to France to play a young gigolo in Sarne’s satirical faux travelogue “Road to Saint Tropez.” His job was to look handsome and mouth the dialogue, which was then rerecorded in French by someone else.

Many of Kier’s early roles — from “The Story of O” to “Suspiria” — were dubbed, though that didn’t bother him. “I knew it could only be better, because they were professional. I’m not,” he says flatly. “So if I look good on-screen, and then a professional actor with a great voice was dubbing me, that would only help.”

The X-rated “Flesh for Frankenstein” was Kier’s first role to feature his real voice. Landing that 1973 movie was a fluke: On a plane from Rome to Munich, he happened to be sitting next to director Paul Morrissey (who died last week at age 86). The American told Kier, “I make movies for Andy Warhol,” and asked for his number, which he jotted down on the last page of his passport. “A few weeks later, I got a call: ‘Hey, it’s Paul. I’m doing a film of ‘Frankenstein’ in 3D, and I have a little role for you.’”

The part was Dr. Frankenstein, which filmed at Cinecittà Studios in Rome. To hear Kier tell it, “Paul went to the producer Carlo Ponti and said, ‘I can make you a film for $300,000,’ and Carlo Ponti said, ‘Then make me two!’” They were irreverent takes on classic monster movies, greenlit with only the loosest of scripts. After the first one wrapped, Morrissey intended to cast Srdjan Zelenovic (who’d played Frankenstein’s studly creation), but passport issues forbade it, so the director told Kier, “I guess we have a German Dracula.

Kier was paid hardly anything (a few thousand dollars) to play the title roles in “Flesh for Frankenstein” and “Blood for Dracula,” but the films made him famous. After stumbling upon an article that called Fassbinder a “genius director” in Stern magazine, Kier reconnected with his old bar buddy. They made several films together and even lived as roommates (but not lovers) for a time.

“I never had money,” says Kier, who crashed on John Waters conspirator Cookie Mueller’s couch in New York at one point. Kier spent the next 15 years in Europe, but credits Van Sant for getting him an American work permit and his SAG card, making it possible for him to move here.

Udo had met Van Sant at the Berlin Film Festival, where the young director told him, “I have a little movie here I made for $20,000, ‘Mala Noche.’ But my next film is ‘My Own Private Idaho,’ and I would like that you play in it.”

Turns out, Madonna was a fan of the film. With her blessing, photographer Steven Meisel reached out about shooting a series of kinky photos for a book. “We did the photo shoot, and then I got a call from her office asking if I would be ready to do hardcore. And I said, ‘Finally!’” Kier says with a laugh. Staged in a strip club, the first round of photos were “harmless.” For the next shoot, they went to a real sex club. “I said to Madonna, ‘How far can I go?’ And she said to me, ‘Do whatever you want.’”

Kier’s not the type to shrink from such an invitation. “On the bar was a pair of beautiful high-heel shoes,” he recalls, offering a window into how his mind works. “I looked at them and I said, ‘I have an idea. Could you put some lemonade in the shoe? It has to look like piss. And I’m in the sling, drinking it.’” Not only did that shot make it into the “Sex” book, but it earned him a starring role in Madonna’s “Deeper and Deeper” music video.

“I don’t calculate it, but I want to do something in a movie which people will remember,” says Kier — who is the most unforgettable ingredient in anything he does. “I’m not an actor who is happy to get a script and do exactly what is written. That would be boring. I have to bring something of my own personality into the film.”

Multiply that by more than 200 roles, and you’ve got the recipe for immortality.