Udo Kier Has His First Leading Role in 50 Years With Swan Song

The acting career of German actor Udo Kier seeps into almost every facet of the film industry. He’s had eye-catching roles in everything from mainstream blockbusters such as Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Blade to critically acclaimed, indie cinema classics such as Dario Argento’s Suspiria and pretty much all of Lars von Trier’s filmography.

If anyone in Hollywood deserves a leading role, it’s Kier. And he finally got one, after only 50 years, with director Todd Stephens’ touching comic drama Swan Song. The Texas Theatre will screen the film this Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

“I cannot believe all the press in America calling it my best film,” Kier says with a laugh from his home in Palm Springs, California.

The positive reviews are well deserved. Kier plays retired hairdresser Pat Pitsenbarger from Sandusky, Ohio, who spends the twilight of his life in a dreary retirement home. He gets a chance to express his creative skill and brilliant eye for beauty one more time in a posthumous request that he styles a wealthy, estranged client (played by Linda Evans) for her funeral. Pitsenbarger hesitates to honor her wishes even for a hefty paycheck but ultimately steps out of the home and takes a long walk back through his past.

“It took almost a year to find the money, and we had 18 days of shooting, which is very little to shoot a feature film,” Kier says. “I went in and said I would like to start chronological in the retirement home and I want to spend there one or two days on my own for the movie. I can get used to the bed and looking out of the window for hours. Then we can start with me leaving the house getting to, how do you say, getting a ride, hitchhike down to the city for the lawyer who wants me to do her hair.”

The long walk to the funeral home in downtown Sandusky forces Kier’s character to take some rough detours through his past to memories of his partner David, who died from AIDS, and his former protégé turned business rival Dee Dee Dale, played by Jennifer Coolidge. 

Kier says the story piqued his interest and led to a meeting with Stephens where he only had one request: no rehearsals.

“I don’t like to rehearse,” Kier says. “I don’t like to act because I’ve been working for 30 years with Lars von Trier and his favorite words, even to people like Lauren Bacall or James Caan, is ‘don’t act.’ Don’t show people that you’re acting. Just be the person.”

One scene finds Kier in Sandusky’s main street donning a bright green leisure suit. This became the film’s poster and a meaningful image for Kier’s character. Pat drinks up the screen in every scene as a confident, wise artist with a disarming and dry sense of humor and wit.

“The street became our studio basically because I knew everybody,” Kier says. “Everything was wonderful, and we had a great time shooting the movie. The actors … Jennifer Coolidge was amazing and Linda Evans and all the other actors, even if they had smaller parts. Everybody was honest and it worked.”

The result is a touching mix of raw emotions from Kier’s honest performance as a man coming to terms with a past he’s spent years trying to forget. Kier says it’s a theme he hoped to convey to the audience from his own past.

“The new generation doesn’t know what it means when friends of yours are dying of AIDS and there was no medication,” Kier says. “Today, people take one pill and they’re undetectable even, but when AIDS came to Germany, people died. They just died. They tried everything possible, took overdoses of penicillin or vitamins or whatever and they died.

“The new generation doesn’t even know this kind of thing and that’s why it’s also in the movie that my friend David, he died of AIDS. … That’s why I made the movie.”

Swan Song not only makes you feel for its characters but also for Kier, whose performance can swing equidistant from sad and serious to seriously funny, even during its heaviest moments. It makes you wish someone had given Kier a leading role sooner.

“I’m sorry, but I have to please all my critics now,” Kier says. “I can only be the leading man.”