Rutger Hauer mini-bio: Rutger Oelsen Hauer is a Dutch film actor. He is well known for his role in Blade Runner (1982). His career changed course when director Paul Verhoeven cast him as the lead in Turkish Delight (1973) (based on the Jan Wolkers book of the same name). The movie found box-office favour abroad as well as at home and within two years, its star was invited to make his English language debut in the British film The Wilby Conspiracy (1975). Set in South Africa and starring Michael Caine and Sidney Poitier, the film was an action melodrama with a focus on apartheid. Hauer's supporting role, however, was hardly enough to establish him in Hollywood's eyes, and he returned to Dutch film making for several years. In this period he made Katie Tippel (1975), and worked again with Verhoeven on Soldier of Orange (1979), and Spetters (1980). Incidentally these two films also paired Hauer with fellow international Dutch actor Jeroen Krabbé.
It was in the Sylvester Stallone vehicle Nighthawks (1981) that Hauer finally made his American debut. Cast as a psychopathic, cold-blooded terrorist named Wulfgar, he made a strong impression, which was confirmed the following year by probably his most famous role, as the violent yet sensitive chief android Roy Batty (pitted against Harrison Ford) in Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi thriller, Blade Runner.
Hauer went on to be the adventurer courting Gene Hackman's daughter (Theresa Russell) in Nicolas Roeg's poorly received Eureka (1983), the investigative reporter opposite John Hurt in Sam Peckinpah's The Osterman Weekend (1983), and the knight paired with Michelle Pfeiffer in the medieval romance Ladyhawke (1985). He continued to make an impression on audiences, especially in The Hitcher (1986), in which he was the mysterious Hitchhiker intent on murdering C. Thomas Howell's lone motorist and anyone who crossed his path en route. At the height of his fame, he was even set to be cast as RoboCop in the film directed by old friend Verhoeven, although the role was re-cast to Peter Weller.
Italian director Ermanno Olmi mined the gentler, more mystic and soulful side of Hauer's personality in The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1989), the story of a lost soul who dies of drink in Paris while attempting to pay a debt of honour in a church. Phillip Noyce also attempted to capitalize, with far less success, on Hauer's spiritual qualities in the martial arts action adventure Blind Fury (1989). He returned to science fiction opposite Joan Chen with Salute of the Jugger (1990), in which he played a former champion in a post-apocalyptic world. He and Chen would again work together in two more science fiction films: Wedlock and Precious Find.
By the 1990s, Hauer was as well known for his humorous appearances in Guinness commercials as for his screen roles. It seemed that he had increasingly become involved in lower budget films, including Split Second, which was set in a flooded London after global warming, Omega Doom, another post-apocalyptic story in which he plays a soldier-robot, and recently New World Disorder, opposite Tara Fitzgerald. In between these lower budgeted films, he appeared in the music video "On a Night Like This" by Kylie Minogue. In the late 1980s and 1990s, as well as 2000, he also appeared in several British and American television productions, including Inside the Third Reich (as Albert Speer), Escape from Sobibor, Fatherland, Hostile Waters, Merlin, The 10th Kingdom, Smallville and Alias.
