Michael Madsen, the actor finest identified for his coolly menacing, steely-eyed, usually sadistic characters within the movies of Quentin Tarantino together with “Reservoir Dogs” and “Kill Bill: Vol. 2,” has died.
Madsen was discovered unresponsive in his house in Malibu, California, on Thursday morning and pronounced useless, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Watch Commander Christopher Jauregui mentioned. He is believed to have died of pure causes and authorities don’t suspect any foul play was concerned. Madsen’s supervisor Ron Smith mentioned cardiac arrest was the obvious trigger. He was 67.
Madsen’s profession spanned greater than 300 credit stretching again to the early Nineteen Eighties, many in low-budget and unbiased movies. He usually performed low-level thugs, gangsters and shady cops in small roles. Tarantino would use that identification, however make him a predominant character.
His torture of a captured police officer in Tarantino’s 1992 directorial debut “Reservoir Dogs,” during which Madsen’s black-suited financial institution robber Vic “Mr. Blonde” Vega severs the person’s ear whereas dancing to Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck within the Middle with You,” was an early career-defining second for each director and actor.
He would turn out to be a Tarantino common. He had a small function because the cowboy-hatted desert dweller Budd, a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, in 2003’s “Kill Bill: Vol. 1,” then a starring function the next yr within the sequel, during which he battles with Uma Thurman’s protagonist The Bride and buries her alive.
Madsen additionally appeared in Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” and “Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood.” He was an alternate option to play the hit man function that revived John Travolta’s profession in 1994’s “Pulp Fiction.” The character, Vincent Vega, is the brother of Madsen’s “Reservoir Dogs” robber in Tarantino’s cinematic universe.
Madsen was born in Chicago to a household of three kids. His sister is Oscar-nominated “Sideways” actor Virginia Madsen.
He carried out on stage with Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company alongside actors together with John Malkovich.
During a handprint ceremony on the TCL Chinese Theatre in November 2020, Michael Madsen mirrored on his first go to to Hollywood within the early Nineteen Eighties.
“I got out and I walked around and I looked and I wondered if there were someday some way that that was going to be a part of me. And I didn’t know because I didn’t know what I was going to do at that point with myself,” he mentioned. “I could have been a bricklayer. I could have been an architect. I could have been a garbage man. I could have been nothing. But I got lucky. I got lucky as an actor.”
His first movie function of any significance was within the 1983 hacker thriller “WarGames” with Matthew Broderick. The following yr he performed professional baseball participant Bump Bailey alongside Robert Redford in “The Natural.”
He spent a lot of the remainder of the Nineteen Eighties doing one-off visitor roles on tv dramas together with “Miami Vice” and “Quantum Leap.”
1991 would carry a profession enhance with roles in “The Doors,” where he played a buddy of Val Kilmer’s Jim Morrison, and “Thelma and Louise” the place he performed the boyfriend of Susan Sarandon’s Louise.
Then would come “Reservoir Dogs.”
In 1995, he performed a black ops mercenary within the sci-fi thriller “Species” and in 1997 he was third billed after Al Pacino and Johnny Depp as a member of a crew of gangsters in “Donnie Brasco.”
He sometimes performed towards kind. In the 1993 household orca journey “Free Willy” he was the foster father to the orphan protagonist.
Madsen would return to smaller roles however labored consistently within the last 20 years of his profession.
“In the last two years Michael Madsen has been doing some incredible work with independent film including upcoming feature films ‘Resurrection Road,’ ‘Concessions and ’Cookbook for Southern Housewives,’ and was really looking forward to this next chapter in his life,” his managers Smith and Susan Ferris and publicist Liz Rodriguez said in a statement. “Michael was also preparing to release a new book called ‘Tears For My Father: Outlaw Thoughts and Poems’ currently being edited.”
They added that he “was considered one of Hollywood’s most iconic actors, who can be missed by many.”
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