David McGillivray meets Swan Song star Udo Kier, the legendary, openly gay actor you may never have heard of
For the past few months, a low-budget, crowd-funded film called Swan Song has created quite a buzz. It’s about a real-life gay hairdresser Pat Pitsenbarger (1943-2012), whom writer-director Todd Stephens knew when he was growing up in Sandusky, Ohio.
Played in the film by veteran actor Udo Kier, Pat, who is retired, ill and in a care home, reluctantly agrees to travel to a funeral parlour to dress the hair of a recently deceased former customer. But the journey to this appointment is less sentimental and more thoughtful than you might expect, given Stephens’s CV (Another Gay Movie, Another Gay Sequel). Most of the praise for the picture, however, has been reserved for Kier, who delivers a late-life tour-de-force as an old-school queen.
Now 77, Kier has forged an extraordinary career working with some of the world’s greatest directors — and appearing in a lot of trash besides. But we haven’t seen him do anything quite like this before. The depth of emotion he brings to what could have been an embarrassing stereotype will surprise you. I caught up with him to find out more.
Born in Cologne, Kier speaks his own, charming version of English. I’d been warned not to ask him personal questions but, when I call him, he begins by telling me where he’s living. “I’m in my house in Palm Springs, a former library which was built in 1965 by a famous architect, Albert Frey,” he reveals.
“I collect mid-20th century furniture, and the art work of my friends — David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring — is on the walls,” he says, dropping a quantity of names that’s allowable when you’ve been in more than 250 films.
“No, I don’t count them,” he confirms, referring to his past work. “But when I do interviews, like I’m doing now with you, people know more about the movies than I do.”
Kier is delighted to hear that I’m calling from London. “England is very, very important,” he assures me, before he goes on to recount why. “I went to London when I was 19 and I went to St Giles School in Oxford Street to learn English. One day a man came to me, his name was Mike Sarne, he was a singer, he said to me, ‘I’m doing my first movie and I would like that you be in my movie.’ I said, ‘I don’t know how to do that, I have no intention of being an actor.’ He convinced me that they would take care of me, so I made the movie and it was very funny. The film was called
