“For me, Cologne is a memory,” begins one of those typical Udo cinema monologues that, once started, so often leave interviewers speechless in reverence. With fifty pfennigs pressed into his hand by his mother so he can go to the cinema to see Elizabeth Taylor, a stream of thoughts begins in our festival office that only the Cologne-born world star can recount.
He naturally heads to the cathedral, where he lights two candles for the Black Madonna, “one for his dead friends, one for the living” – but then he goes back to Liz Taylor.
At a dinner at the Basel Art Fair, “where you always have to wait so long for your food,” he finally meets his early idol.
“I then said to all the painters at my table that I was going to take two flowers from the decoration and go to Elizabeth Taylor and kiss her. So I went up to her, said, ‘You are so beautiful,’ and kissed her on the forehead. She said, ‘Thank you!’”
When you meet Udo Kier for an interview, you never know who you're dealing with: the star or the fan. That fits someone who owes his fame to Andy Warhol productions, except that Udo Kier's fifteen minutes of fame never ended.
It is quite possible that Albert Oehlen was among the artist friends who witnessed the attack on Liz Taylor at Art Basel. In BAD PAINTER, which is now enjoying its German premiere at the Cologne Cinema Nights, he plays the painter's alter ego and, of course, himself again. For in Udo Kier's media persona, the ideal images of model and artist overlap in a unique way.
Since the early 1970s, he has been moving between Hollywood and arthouse cinema, big-budget films and artistic experiments, including important works by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Christoph Schlingensief, and Lars von Trier. A documentary film celebrated him as an “arteholic” in his second life as a friend of art and artists.
His life story, no matter which page you turn to, resembles a 19th-century bohemian novel—except that in those novels, it is always the women who meet the artists—and it never ends well for them.
"The fact that I was discovered had even less to do with art than with the fact that I was a very photogenic man. I didn't get into film because of my talent, but because of my looks. I was aware of that. When I sat next to Paul Morrissey on the plane and he asked me what I did, as a young actor I naturally had my photo at hand. Then he wanted my number, and I wrote it in his American passport. A few weeks later, I got a call: he was making a small film, FRANKENSTEIN IN 3D, and he had a small role for me. I asked, “What am I playing?” And he said, “Frankenstein.”
Udo Kier's confessions were immortalized a few days after his 80th birthday, just before the presentation of the INTERNATIONAL ACTORS AWARD at our festival.
FILM FESTIVAL COLOGNE presents
BAD PAINTER (German premiere)
► May 24, 2025, 9:30 p.m., Filmforum at Museum Ludwig
