Udo Kier’s Dracula: The Real Story Behind Those Wheelchair Rumors
Udo Kier, cult cinema icon behind Baron von Frankenstein and Dracula, died Sunday morning at 81, his partner Delbert McBride confirmed to Variety. No cause of death has been disclosed.
One of cinema's great chameleons is gone. Udo Kier, the gloriously odd screen presence who swung from art-house provocation to big-studio villainy without blinking, died Sunday morning. He was 81. His partner, artist Delbert McBride, confirmed the news (via Variety). No cause of death has been shared.
The short version: why Udo mattered
If you only know Kier from being the icy bad guy in Blade or popping up in Melancholia, you still got the idea: nobody did elegant menace quite like him. But his legend was forged earlier, playing the title roles in Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey’s Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974) — lurid, X-rated rethinks of classic monsters that somehow earned real acclaim while splashing explicit violence and nudity across the screen. Kier was unforgettable in both.
The Dracula diet that went too far
Kier told The Guardian that Morrissey promised him Dracula if he dropped 10 pounds in a week. Kier, never one to dodge a dare, basically lived on lettuce and water. It worked — a little too well. On day one, he says he was so depleted he needed a wheelchair and could not stand to greet Italian screen giant Vittorio De Sica.
"On the first day of shooting, I was introduced to Vittorio De Sica... I was so weak from only eating salad leaves and water, I was in a wheelchair because I couldn’t stand up."
It is a very Udo Kier story: extreme, theatrical, and somehow funny in the dark way his films often were.
The very unconventional origin story
Kier did not train at a drama school or climb the usual theater ladder. Born in Germany, he moved to England at 18, and a literal stranger pulled him into his first movie, Road to Saint Tropez, in the 1960s. By his own account in a 2012 Icon vs Icon chat, he liked the attention, realized he could make a living at it, and went all in. That instinct paid off: he ultimately racked up more than 200 film credits.
Airplane meet-cute to Baron von Frankenstein
The Frankenstein gig happened because Kier sat next to director Paul Morrissey on a plane. When Kier mentioned he was an actor, Morrissey scribbled his number in a passport and, weeks later, called to say he had a part — not a small one, either. Baron von Frankenstein would help cement Kier’s cult status and kick off decades of fascinating picks.
Career stops that read like a world tour
- Rainer Werner Fassbinder: The Stationmaster's Wife, The Third Generation, Lili Marleen.
- Gus Van Sant: Van Sant helped Kier secure an American work permit and a SAG card, then cast him in My Own Private Idaho alongside Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix.
- Lars von Trier: Starting in the late 80s with Epidemic and Europa, then The Kingdom on TV, and later Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, Melancholia, and Nymphomaniac.
- Pop culture lane changes: Featured in Madonna's 1992 book Sex and appeared in her Erotica and Deeper and Deeper videos.
- Blockbuster cameo life: Blade and other mainstream projects proved he could play slick evil at any budget level.
- Final credit: Most recently, he appears in Kleber Mendonça Filho's film The Secret Agent, which stands as his last screen role.
Money, voice work, and the life off-camera
Per Celebrity Net Worth, Kier left behind an estimated $10 million. On top of the film checks, he voiced Doctor Peter Glucksbringer Straub in Call of Duty: WWII, because of course the man with that voice ended up in a massive video game.
Kier was openly gay and said in a 2021 Bay Area Reporter interview that his sexuality was a non-issue on sets — people cared about whether he nailed the role, not who he dated. He moved to Palm Springs in 1991 and talked in 2021 about writing a memoir that would be published only after his death, promising it would tell the truth and that any proceeds would go to the AIDS Foundation.
The takeaway
Udo Kier built the kind of career most actors dream about and very few pull off: risky, weird, international, and unmistakably his. No matter the director, the budget, or the genre, he made sure you looked at him first. That is a hard trick to teach — and impossible to forget.