Once you learn to recognise Udo Kier (piercing green eyes; effete, angelic face; smooth German accent) he starts to crop up everywhere: loitering in the background of Madonna's Sex book; vomiting blood in 1970s vampire films; brutalising Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves; crooning to Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho; chairing corporate vampirism in Blade; selling his fiancee into erotic slavery in softcore classic The Story of O.
Evil is what Kier does best. Over the past 30 years, he has virtually cornered the market in antichrists, bohemian denizens, vampires, villains and other roles demanding unspeakable but well-groomed depravity. As such, he has acquired an iconic status that far exceeds his box-office clout or his screen time.
His filmography is split between major roles in minor films and minor roles in major films. Currently he's the antichrist in British-made biblical thriller Revelation, and as a suave German count in Herzog's Invincible, while a retrospective of his work has just completed at London's ICA.
"It's not me, it's the people who cast me," he says of his satanic stereotyping. Although he claims not to mix with directors, he has an aptitude for being spotted by them. "I send out a vibration. I think every director wants something in you that they don't know what it is. They want to discover something. I'm not going to tell them what it is."
Now approaching 60 and enjoying mainstream attention, he's the first to admit he's had a charmed life. He has a fine selection of anecdotes to prove it, too, starting with the story of how he and his mother were rescued from the rubble after a Cologne hospital was bombed during the second world war. "I'm a lucky man. I was lucky that, by nature, I looked good. I was lucky to meet the right people and be in the right places but I've never forced things. I just wanted to get out of Germany. That was my intention - to get out of that misery I was born into."
Luck took him into acting, while he was studying in London in 1966. At the suggestion of a friend, he did a casting for director Mike Sarne, who cast him in his short film The Road To St Tropez. A few years later, luck put him on a plane seat next to Andy Warhol's surrogate director Paul Morrissey. It was his big break: "I didn't know who he was. We got talking. I said I was an actor and showed him my photos, and he wrote down my number on the last page of his passport." Morrissey called him to Italy to play the lead in his camp horror Flesh for Frankenstein. Even the louche Warhol set were impressed by Kier's ability to keep a straight face while simulating necrophilia and reciting: "To know death, Otto, you must fuck life, in the gall bladder."
Morrissey then cast him as the lead in Frankenstein's companion picture, Blood for Dracula. The film has become a horror milestone, thanks partly to its Marxist overtones and a bizarre cast including eminent directors Roman Polanski and Vittorio De Sica, but primarily due to Kier's highly original interpretation of Count Dracula. Kier portrays him as a sickly, pathetic creature, whose futile quest for "wirgins" ultimately results in his grisly dismemberment.
"I took it all very seriously," he recalls. "Morrissey told me I had to lose 10lbs in five days, so I stopped eating completely. That's why my Dracula was in a wheelchair. I was so weak I couldn't walk."
After Morrissey, there was Fassbinder, whose extended clique of actors, drug addicts and ex-lovers he became part of. Fassbinder gave him roles in several productions, including Lola, Lili Marleen and his epic Berlin-Alexanderplatz and, though they lived together at one point, Kier avoided becoming too close to him. "Working with someone like Fassbinder was a 24-hour job. You had to be part of the family, and play his games. It just became more and more intense. I moved out because he was burning himself up in such a destructive way. I didn't want to be part of it. He threw my suitcases down the stairs because he wanted to say that he'd thrown me out. He died two months later."
Not long after Fassbinder's death, Kier was showing his own short film, Last Trip to Harrisburg, at a festival. Who should he run into in the beer tent? Lars von Trier, whose Element of Crime was playing. No prizes for guessing what happened next. Von Trier cast Kier in his TV production of Medea in 1987. Soon after, he became godfather to Von Trier's son, and has been a regular in his films ever since.
"There are certain people I've met in my life who were brilliant. Lars is one," he says. "You can see it in his eyes when he's working - there's a change." Kier has been witness to the on-set traumas that seem to characterise Von Trier's films - with Emily Watson on Breaking The Waves, with Bjork on Dancer in the Dark, and currently, rumour has it, with Nicole Kidman on his new film Dogville. But the stories are greatly exaggerated, he says. "The atmosphere is usually totally relaxed. We begin at nine in the morning and go home at five. And he has a great sense of humour. The stories about Lars and his women are always the same but they all get awards and Oscar nominations don't they? Nicole will maybe be better than ever."
Kier has been based in LA since the 1990s, paying the bills with such big-budget horror projects as Blade, Armageddon and End of Days in between his European projects. Far from being a succession of celebrity orgies and human sacrifices, his life off-screen is quiet and solitary. "I have few friends. I can count them on one hand. I go by myself to the cleaners and the supermarket and I live alone with my dogs. I collect modern art and furniture. I love to work in the garden, because to plant little trees and see them grow is for me something fascinating, especially palm trees." They symbolise feeling well, he says. His aunt used to send him postcards of them when he was a boy. "They were my escape. I had such a horrible childhood. My father was already married with three children when I was born and my mother didn't know. So we grew up poor. We had no hot water until I was 17. I went to work in a factory, and worked and saved for months until I had the money to come to England.
"I'm an aesthetic person who loves beauty. When I'm in London, I go to Leicester Square and visit the French church [Notre Dame de France], to see Jean Cocteau's beautiful altar. I buy two candles, one for my dead friends and one for my living friends, and I go out in a good mood. Then I go and play the antichrist."
· Revelation and Invincible are on release.
