In 1966, a pouty-mouthed Udo Kier made his movie debut in a zippy short called “Road to Saint Tropez,” playing a gigolo who has a fling with an older woman.
In “Swan Song,” a new movie from the writer-director Todd Stephens, Kier plays Mr. Pat, a flamboyant former hairdresser languishing in a grim nursing home outside Sandusky, Ohio, a working-class city on the Lake Erie shore.
13, completes Stephens’s indie Ohio Trilogy, which began with writing “Edge of Seventeen” , stories of Gen X gay boys itching to leave Sandusky for New York.
“I hadn’t thought of him because he’s German,” said Stephens, who based the character on Pat Pitsenbarger, a hairdresser and drag performer he encountered as a teenager exploring his own sexuality in Sandusky’s gay circles in the ’80s.
Over the phone from his home in Palm Springs, Calif., Kier took the conversation in multitudes of directions.
In all the films I did, from “Blade” to “Shadow of the Vampire,” I always had — I hate that word supporting — I had smaller roles.
In Germany, they called “Dallas” and “Dynasty” street cleaners because when they were on television, nobody was in the street.
Since we started in the retirement home, I slept there alone without a camera and got a feeling for the corridors and for the bathrooms. Then I had an apartment in Sandusky.
There were also little things over my life that I have seen in clubs or privately, how people, when they sit down, put one leg over the other just so.
When I was a young man in Germany, if two men lived together and the neighbors could hear erotic noises, they would call the police and the people would be arrested.
I met Fassbinder when he was 15, and I was 16, in Cologne in a working-class bar with a mix of truck drivers and secretaries.
When I went back to Germany, he offered me a role in “The Stationmaster’s Wife” and that was our first work together.
I did “House of Boys,” a very important film for the gay community.
I guess if someone said that I had seven hours to live, I would have a party with wonderful drinks.