Michael Madsen, a sledgehammer of an actor who became one of Hollywood’s reigning bare-knuckled heavies thanks to indelible performances in Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” and “Kill Bill” series, as well as in the critically acclaimed mob film “Donnie Brasco,” died on Thursday at his home in Malibu, Calif. He was 67.
The cause was cardiac arrest, said his manager, Ron Smith.
Mr. Madsen never achieved true leading-man status like his soul mates Charles Bronson and James Gandolfini — but perhaps, measured by volume, he did. A tough guy’s tough guy, he seemed ubiquitous in his 1990s heyday, one of those guy-who-was-in-everything actors, like Don Cheadle and Luis Guzmán.
His Internet Movie Database entry cites 346 acting credits. By comparison, Mr. Bronson, a longtime marquee-topper known for star vehicles like the “Death Wish” series, had 164 when he died in 2003 at 81.
With a whiff of Mickey Rourke, a hint of Sylvester Stallone and a linebacker’s physique, Mr. Madsen had the air of a timeless Hollywood bad guy who seemed to have stepped out of a 1940s film noir.
This point was abundantly clear to the actor himself.
“Maybe I was just born in the wrong era, man,” he said in a 2004 interview with The Guardian. “I’m a bit of a throwback to the days of black-and-white movies. 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.”
If the role called for a sprinkle of sadism, Mr. Madsen was your man, as showcased in “Reservoir Dogs” (1992), Mr. Tarantino’s breakout thriller about a crew of slick-suited thieves bungling a diamond heist in the bloodiest possible fashion. He was part of an ensemble cast that also included Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn and Steve Buscemi.
Few could forget — or sleep after seeing — Mr. Madsen’s flinch-inducing performance in the film as the very brunette Mr. Blonde fiddling with a stereo knob, then strutting his way around a warehouse with a straight razor and a psychopath’s sang-froid to the sound of “Stuck in the Middle With You,” the hit 1973 song by Stealers Wheel, as he draws out the torture of a soon-to-be-earless kidnapped police officer.
As his career unfolded, Mr. Madsen remained in the Tarantino inner circle. He brought his thug gravitas to the director’s samurai-sword blood baths “Kill Bill: Volume 1” (2003) and “Kill Bill: Volume 2” (2004), as Budd, a.k.a. Sidewinder, the honky-tonk strip club bouncer and former assassin whom Uma Thurman’s own assassin character has vowed to kill.
In 2015, he had a “Reservoir Dogs” reunion with Mr. Roth in Mr. Tarantino’s sprawling western vengeance tale, “The Hateful Eight,” playing Joe Gage, a gruff cowboy with a sartorial flair. Mr. Madsen also had a cameo in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” the director’s 2019 movieland-meets-Manson tour de force.
Mr. Madsen received critical kudos for another outside-the-law performance: as the menacingly cool mob boss Sonny in “Donnie Brasco,” the 1997 film based on a true story about an undercover cop (Johnny Depp) who befriends a worn-down mob enforcer (Al Pacino) in order to infiltrate a crew in the Bonanno crime family.
In a 2008 interview with Film.com, Mr. Madsen expressed mixed feelings about being Hollywood’s default bone-breaker.
“When they want to put Michael Madsen in their movie because he’s done it before and you think he’s going to save your movie — then it’s a drag,” he said. “But if you’re surrounded by people who understand there’s a little more complexity to it than the pulling of a trigger, then it’s a real pleasure.”
Michael Madsen was born on Sept. 25, 1957, in Chicago, one of three children of Calvin and Elaine (Melson) Madsen. His mother has worked as a filmmaker and producer; his father was a firefighter. One of his two sisters is the actress Virginia Madsen, who received an Academy Award nomination for her performance alongside Paul Giamatti in “Sideways,” Alexander Payne’s 2004 testament to the oenophile life.
In his early years, Mr. Madsen worked as a mechanic and later as a paramedic, but his career path took a big turn in 1980, when he accompanied a friend to see a production of “Of Mice and Men,” based on the John Steinbeck novel, by Chicago’s renowned Steppenwolf Theater Company.
Enraptured by the performance of its star, John Malkovich, Mr. Madsen tracked him down in the wings. “He asked for my address and said he’d send me a brochure for acting classes,” Mr. Madsen recalled in a 2016 interview with the British newspaper The Independent. “I thought he was just trying to get rid of me.”
Mr. Malkovich made good on the offer, and after Mr. Madsen took acting classes, he ended up with a role in a different Steppenwolf production of the same play, playing a ranch hand.
He soon turned to Hollywood, securing a role in “WarGames,” the 1983 computer thriller starring Matthew Broderick, and “Racing With the Moon” (1984), a coming-of-age story set during World War II, with Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage in starring roles.
Mr. Madsen stole scenes in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” (1991) playing Tom Baker, a swaggering poet friend of Jim Morrison, and in “Mulholland Falls” (1996), as a, yes, tough-guy Los Angeles detective.
Mr. Madsen stepped out of his brass-knuckles persona in the groundbreaking feminist road movie “Thelma & Louise” (1991), in which he brought “shades of Elvis Presley to the role of Louise’s once footloose and now devoted beau,” as Janet Maslin wrote in a review in The New York Times. (Louise was Susan Sarandon’s character.) He did so again in the tenderhearted boy-meets-Orca film “Free Willy” (1993).
At times Mr. Madsen managed to secure the lead, as in “Strength and Honor” (2007), in which he played a wearied Irish boxer who has to dust off his gloves to pay for a heart operation for his son.
He also landed in more B-movies that he cared to mention.
“You get these horrifying straight-to-video things for very little money,” he told The Guardian, “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 had inserted an expletive.)
In addition to his sister Virginia, his survivors include his third wife, DeAnna Madsen; his children, Christian, Max, Luke and Calvin Madsen; his mother; and another sister, Cheryl Madsen. His son, Hudson, died at 26 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 2022.
Even in real life, Mr. Madsen had his rough side. Last August, he was arrested on a charge of misdemeanor domestic battery involving his wife. Charges were later dropped.
His onscreen persona also affected the way fans reacted to him on the street. “I think people really fear me,” he said in a 2018 interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“But I’m not that guy,” he added. “I’m just an actor. I’m a father, I’ve got seven children. I’m married, I’ve been married 20 years. When I’m not making a movie, I’m home, in pajamas, watching ‘The Rifleman’ on TV, hopefully with my 12-year-old making me a cheeseburger.
“I sure as hell had my rabble-rousing days,” he added, “but sooner or later you have to get over that and move on.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
The post Michael Madsen, a Familiar Hollywood Heavy, Is Dead at 67 appeared first on New York Times.
