WASHINGTON POST: The prolific career of memorable tough guy and Tarantino favourite Michael Madsen, dead at 67

Michael Madsen, a prolific screen actor who captivated audiences with his chillingly intense performances, most memorably as a sadistic thief who slices off a man’s ear in “Reservoir Dogs,” Quentin Tarantino’s directorial debut, died July 3 at his home in Malibu, California. He was 67.

The cause was cardiac arrest, said his manager Ron Smith.

In a career spanning more than 300 movies and television shows, Mr Madsen was frequently cast as volatile, trigger-happy tough guys. Tall and ruggedly handsome at 187cm, he landed small roles in a few big movies, including WarGames (1983) and The Natural (1984), before playing a violent ex-boyfriend in the John Dahl thriller Kill Me Again (1989), starring Val Kilmer.

Then came Reservoir Dogs (1992), a modestly budgeted movie that helped usher in a new era for independent film.

Joining an ensemble cast that included Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi and Lawrence Tierney, Mr Madsen played an ex-con known as Mr Blonde, a member of an anonymous eight-man gang that plots to rob a jewelry store. When the heist goes wrong, Mr Blonde takes a hostage, a police officer (Kirk Baltz) whom he tortures at the group’s warehouse hideout.

As the radio plays Stuck in the Middle With You, Mr Blonde goes to work with a straight razor, cutting off the man’s ear and dousing him with gasoline.

The film’s violence polarised viewers, although Mr Madsen was widely praised for his performance. Film critic Roger Ebert compared him to “a very mean Robert De Niro,” writing that Mr Madsen “emerges with the kind of really menacing screen presence only a few actors achieve”.

Mr Madsen was offered a role in Tarantino’s next feature, Pulp Fiction (1994). But in a decision he regretted for years, he passed on the chance to play the film’s sharp-dressed hit man, the Vincent character (ultimately played by John Travolta), to take a good-guy role: one of the title character’s brothers in Wyatt Earp, which starred Kevin Costner as the frontier lawman.

“I saw myself as the romantic hero,” Mr Madsen told Britain’s Independent newspaper in 2020. “I wanted to be Errol Flynn. I wanted to ride over the hill on my horse with the girl at the end of the movie, you know? I was worried about doing a part like Mr Blonde because I thought, ‘If I cut this guy’s ear off, and then get blasted by Tim Roth, where am I gonna go from there’?”

Critics panned “Wyatt Earp,” an overstuffed western that Mr Madsen later likened to “three hours of nausea”. Pulp Fiction, by contrast, made more than $US200m, earned John Travolta an Oscar nomination and became one of the decade’s most acclaimed movies.

Wounded by Mr Madsen’s decision to pass on the film, Mr Tarantino stopped speaking with the actor for years, according to the Guardian, before patching things up and casting him in his two-volume “Kill Bill” series (2003-04).

Mr Madsen was featured in the revenge saga’s second installment as the ex-assassin Budd, the brother of Bill (David Carradine), whom Uma Thurman pursues with a katana and, in Budd’s case, a venomous black mamba.

He later appeared in two more Tarantino films, playing a cowboy nicknamed The Cow Puncher in The Hateful Eight (2015) and, in a cameo opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, a sheriff on the fictional TV show Bounty Law in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

Mr Madsen also won plaudits for his performance as a mobster in the crime drama Donnie Brasco (1997), starring Al Pacino and Johnny Depp as an undercover FBI agent who infiltrates the Bonanno crime family.

For years, however, he appeared mainly in forgettable B-movies with titles such as Man With a Gun (1995) and Piranhaconda (2012), taking paycheque jobs that he described as a way to support himself and his family.

“You get these horrifying straight-to-video things for very little money, then you go to the Cannes Film Festival and they got some poster of you, 40 feet high, in the worst movie in the world. You’re like, ‘Oh my God. Take the . . . thing down!’” he told the Guardian in 2004.

“Maybe I was just born in the wrong era, man. I’m a bit of a throwback to the days of black and white movies,” he said. “Those guys back then, they had a certain kind of directness about them. A lot of the screenplays, the plots were very simplistic - they gave rise to a type of antihero that maybe I suit better.”

The second of three children, Michael Soren Madsen was born in Chicago on September 25, 1957. His parents separated when Mr Madsen was 9. His father, Carl, was a firefighter; his mother, Elaine, worked in finance and became a documentary filmmaker and author.

After graduating from high school, Mr Madsen worked as a gas station attendant and auto mechanic. Inspired by a production of “Of Mice and Men” at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, he enrolled in one of the company’s acting classes, learning for a time under actor John Malkovich.

His younger sister, Virginia Madsen, followed him into show business, earning an Oscar nomination for “Sideways.”

Mr Madsen moved to Los Angeles in 1983 and won small television roles in shows including “Cagney & Lacey” and “Miami Vice.” In 1991, he appeared in “The Doors,” directed by Oliver Stone, as well as “Thelma & Louise,” playing Susan Sarandon’s musician boyfriend.

He was later featured in big-budget movies including “Species” (1995), as a mercenary enlisted to kill a human-alien hybrid, and as rough-edged detective characters in “Mulholland Falls” (1996) and “Sin City” (2005). In “Die Another Day” (2002), he played a National Security Agency official working with Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond.

While he kept busy as an actor, Mr Madsen was also a photographer and published poet, with plans to put out a new book called “Tears For My Father: Outlaw Thoughts and Poems.”

His marriage to Georganne LaPiere, Cher’s half sister, ended in divorce, as did his second marriage, to Jeannine Bisignano.

In 1996, he married DeAnna Morgan. Mr Madsen was arrested last year on a domestic battery charge, for what a representative described at the time as “a disagreement” with his wife. The couple had reportedly separated after their son Hudson, 26, died by suicide in 2022. The misdemeanour charge was dropped.

Survivors include his wife; a son from his second marriage, Christian; three sons from his third, Max, Luke and Calvin; his mother; and two sisters.

Although he remained best known for Reservoir Dogs, Mr Madsen often noted that he could play gentler roles as well, like the foster father who helps his son release a killer whale from captivity in Free Willy (1993).

“The type of character I think I play really well,” he told the Independent, “is somebody who’s not perfect, who’s a little rough around the edges … not out of a GQ magazine, and might have a cigarette now and then or need a shave, but you can bet … I’m gonna do the right thing. That’s the real Michael more than anything, and I just wish it was captured on film.”