Rutger Hauer

Blond, blue-eyed Rutger Hauer stars in two films on this season's list. In Bladerunner he steals the show from Harrison Ford as replicant Roy Batty; while in The Hitcher he is the show, a magnificently malevolent performance which led to him being described as 'everybody's favourite psycho'. Not entirely true, perhaps, but that film and those such as Blade Runner and Wanted: Dead Or Alive could have led a lesser actor to being typecast as menacing villains.

Not so Mr Hauer: he claims now to be finished with playing bad guys for a while, a sad loss (if only temporary) of one of cinema's greatest miscreants. However, he has proved himself perfectly capable of handling more elegant rôles: Coco Chanel's lover in Chanel Solitaire, Theresa Russell's husband in Nic Roeg's Eureka (if that can be described as elegant), the romantic hero in Ladyhawke. With what he will follow his latest film, Wanted: Dead Or Alive, we shall have to wait and see, but his eventual return to malevolence will, to this writer's mind, be a welcome one.

Hauer was discovered, so to speak, by Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, with whom he made early films such as Turkish Delight and Soldier of Orange and the more recent Flesh and Blood the film Michael Parkinson refused to review. Between these he played opposite mega-buck stars Harrison Ford and, in Nighthawks, as an international terrorist with Sylvester Stallone, stars he now seems fit to join in cinema's halls of fame.

His stormy youth may hold a clue to his apparent affinity for villainous parts as, within the space of a few years he ran away from school, became a merchant seaman in his early teens, left the navy, joined and left acting school, enlisted in the Dutch army and later discharged himself on the grounds of psychological unfitness. Is this significant? It is this self-confidence which makes him so watchable and inspired, and his on-screen charisma is such that he can hold attention without so much as speaking a word. Given a few more parts where he can display these gifts to their best advantage there is no reason why he cannot receive internationally the acclaim he deserves. 

PJS