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One was a Jamaican singer who became a leading figure in the reggae music genre. The other was a German-born actor who specialized in eccentric and horrific roles. You wouldn’t think that Jimmy Cliff and Udo Kier, both of whom passed away earlier this week at age 81, would have much in common. And yet the two men became cult icons in the 1970s thanks to the weird and wonderful world of “midnight movies.”
Born James Chambers in northwest Jamaica’s Cornwall county in 1944, Cliff was writing songs while in grade school and had his first hit record with 1961’s “Hurricane Hattie.” Adopting the stage name Jimmy Cliff, he was a popular ska/reggae performer in his native country but moved to England in the mid-’60s. His debut album, Hard Road to Travel, came out in 1967, followed two years later by the popular single “Many Rivers to Cross.”
Cliff made the jump from musician to actor in the 1972 film The Harder They Come. Set and filmed in Jamaica and based on the real-life exploits of local criminal Ivanhoe “Rhyging” Martin, the violent, song-filled drama follows Cliff’s “Ivan” from his rural home to the troubled streets of Kingston. Ivan’s attempts at finding music stardom lead him to encounters with a duplicitous preacher, a crooked record promoter, drug runners, and corrupt cops as he becomes an outlaw hero.
Propelled by a reggae soundtrack that included “Many Rivers to Cross,” “You Can Get It If You Really Want,” and the title song, The Harder They Come was a massive hit in its home country. By the mid-’70s it was a U.S. favorite on college campuses and repertoire cinemas, where it joined such cult gems as El Topo, Freaks, Pink Flamingos, and Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein…the last of which just happens to star Udo Kier. Cliff, however, went back to his first loves, music and performing live. He appeared in only two more films, the Caribbean-themed comedy Club Paradise (1986) and the crime tale Rude Boy: The Jamaican Don (2003). A 2010 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, Cliff passed away on November 24 from pneumonia.
It’s no exagerration to say that Udo Kier was destined for a life of chaos. Moments after Udo Kierspe was born in a Cologne, Germany hospital in 1944, the building was bombed by Allied aircraft. Both he and his mother had to be rescued from the debris. Befriending future German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder as a teenager, Kier pursued work as a fashion model, traveling across Europe and to New York.
Kier made his film debut in Michael Sarne’s 1966 short Road to Saint Tropez. He became a fixture in German TV and indie cinema in the early 1970s, with key parts in the 1970 “witch trial” shocker Mark of the Devil and the 1972 Cold War thriller The Salzburg Connection. Udo next starred in a pair of sordid, satirical horror outings for writer/director Paul Morrissey. 1973’s Flesh for Frankenstein found his onsessed Baron Von Frankenstein declaring to an assistant, “To know death, Otto, you have to **** life…in the gall bladder!” Playing the title role in the following year’s Blood for Dracula, Kier’s vampire lord seeks beautiful virgins to bite in the neck. Unfortunately for Drac, they’re in short supply. Featuring over-the-top dark humor and loads of gore, both were released in America as Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein (in 3-D) and Andy Warhol’s Dracula, respectively. Asked about his involvement with the pictures, Warhol replied “I attended the parties.”
Kier co-starred in Just Jaeckin’s steamy softcore drama Story of O (1975) and had an uncredited turn in Dario Argento chiller Suspiria (1977). He reunited with Fassbinder for 1979’s The Third Generation and worked with him on 1980’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and Lola and Lili Marleen in 1981. His sporadic 1980s screen work included a cameo in Moscow on the Hudson (1983) with Robin Williams; the erotic German thriller Seduction: The Cruel Woman (1985); and the Danish dark comedy Epidemic (1987), the first of many collaborations with director Lars von Trier.
Udo made up for his limited ’80s appearances–in abundance–over the following three decades. Some ’90s highlights were as Hans, who hooks up with hustlers River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991); billionaire Ron Camp in 1994’s Ace Ventura: Pet Detective; a reunion with Reeves in the cyberpunk actioner Johnny Mnemonic (1995); alongside Pamela Anderson in 1996’s Barb Wire; a NASA psychologist in Armageddon (1998); vampire elder Dragonetti in Blade (also ’98); and as Dr. Abel opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1999’s End of Days. In between movies he also found time to be photographed with Madonna in several risqué shots for her 1992 book Sex.
In 2000’s bizarre Shadow of the Vampire, he played Albin Grau, the real-life producer/designer of the silent horror classic Nosferatu. From 1996 to 2011 Kier was featured in von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, Maderlay, and Melancholia. 2007 found him cast as Morgan Waller in Rob Zombie’s Halloween reboot, and that same year he was seen in Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the SS faux trailer in Grindhouse. Udo even found time to guest star on such TV shows as Red Shoe Diaries, Nash Bridges, and Chuck while doing voice work on Justice League, Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, and other animated programs.
Kier’s later work included roles in Guy Maddin’s Homeric updating Keyhole (2012); Alexander Payne’s sci-fi satire Downsizing (2017); and as a gay Ohio hairdresser who comes out of retirement to make a former client look fabulous for her funeral in Swan Song (2021). Open about his homosexuality off camera, Udo once told an interviewer, “Maybe it was obvious, but it didn’t make any difference because all that mattered was the role I was playing.” After appearing in over 250 movies and scores of TV shows, the iconoclastic actor died in Palm Springs, California on November 23. Of his body of work, Kier gave a frank self-assessment to Interview magazine: “100 films are not good, 50 are OK, and 50 are very good.”