RUTGER HAUER R.I.P.

That Rutger half smile and those twinkling but at the same time piercing eyes, that's the way I remember Rutger. I have a million Rutger Hauer stories. We met through a friend in the 1980s and became instant cohorts. He introduced me to my dear friend the late great poet and playwright Lynn Manning, who also happened to be the blind heavyweight judo champion of the world when Rutger was playing a blind martial arts master and needed coaching.

He traveled around Europe in one of those huge "American" trailer trucks that he customized the inside of into a 1980s bachelor pad (lots of black light and leopard skin upholstery and barbells etc.). He got studios and production companies to hire me to co-write with him movie ideas he had, which was challenging since every time we got together he'd have seen or read something that inspired him to go in a totally different direction (including once where the ending reveals the whole movie was a fantasy in the mind of a prisoner in solitary).

We first met in New York, but after I moved to LA in 1982 we'd run into each other there or he'd come up with some project that would give us a reason to hang out. Once talking a studio into flying me to Paris where he was making a film and told them he needed me there to work on a screenplay with him for a future movie (that never got made as far as I know).

I was surprised to learn from the news of his demise that he was two years younger than me. He was such a commanding presence that he not only seemed much larger than me but older and wiser too, if at times uniquely eccentric. First time he visited me at a house I was renting in Santa Monica he showed up in nothing but farmer overalls. He claimed the monologue his dying character in BLADERUNNER speaks was totally improvised and spontaneous.

We had a little fallout when I barged in on a reading of a screenplay I'd adapted from a stage play he bought the rights to and put his name on as co-writer with me but didn't ask me to take part in the reading for execs at some studio and my ego got hurt and I did what I sometimes did to defend it that usually came across as angry and/or arrogant. But next time I saw him he was his usual sweet self.

He was a great actor and a total original. There was and will never be anyone like him. I wish I'd kept in touch better. Condolences to all who loved him, which includes me.