Michael Madsen will be remembered for one of the defining cinematic moments of the 1990s
, who has died of cardiac arrest in California at the age of 67, was involved in a defining cinematic image of the 1990s. His terpsichorean brutalisation, in 1992, of the terrified cop in
Quentin Tarantino's
Reservoir Dogs was right up there with
Leonardo DiCaprio
bellowing 'King of the World' in Titanic and Keanu Reeves evading hurtling bullets in The Matrix.
The scene announced an ironic brutality that would run right through pop culture in the last decade of the 20th century. Before and after slicing off the bloodied officer's ear – at which point the camera coyly looks in another direction – Madsen does a horrendous soft-shoe shuffle to Stuck in the Middle with You by Stealers Wheel. It's hard to think of anybody else with the right combination of mischief and menace to pull it off.
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Michael Madsen, star of Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill and Donnie Brasco, dies aged 67
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Tarantino had (and still has) a genius for making stars of hitherto mid-ranking actors. He later did that for Christoph Waltz. He bumped Samuel L Jackson up a great many rungs in Pulp Fiction.
Madsen had already impressed as Geena Davis's hopeless boyfriend in Thelma & Louise, but Reservoir Dogs seemed to have located a new constellation in the heavens. Here was a charismatic heavy for the ages. A new George Raft. A new James Coburn. That wasn't quite how it worked out.
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Reservoir Dogs: Michael Madsen, Quentin Tarantino, Harvey Keitel, Chris Penn, Lawrence Tierney, Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi and Edward Bunker in Tarantino's 1992 film. Photograph: Miramax
He toiled with Stakhanovite energy ever since – the Internet Movie Database lists an eye-watering 346 acting credits between 1982 and 2025 – but the great roles in important films kept eluding him.
'I should have at least got a meeting with Spielberg for Private Ryan,' he told the Guardian in 2004. 'LA Confidential was written with me in mind, but Russell Crowe got the part. Go figure.'
If, any year this century, you strolled around the Cannes market – a veritable bazaar beneath the Palais des Festivals – his 2-D presence proved unavoidable.
'You get these horrifying straight-to-video things for very little money,' he said. 'Then you go to the Cannes Film Festival, and they got some poster of you, 40ft high, in the worst movie in the world.'
Tarantino again made good use of the actor in Kill Bill, The Hateful Eight and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but it feels as if the wider industry never properly knew what to do with him.
Madsen was born and raised in the blue-collar city of Chicago. There was creative energy elsewhere in the family. Elaine Madsen, his mother, won an Emmy for producing the documentary Better than It Has to Be in 1983.
Virginia Madsen, his sister, is a fine actor with credits on Candyman, The Rainmaker and – securing her an Oscar nomination in 2005 – Alexander Payne's beloved comedy Sideways.
Yet Michael Madsen didn't remember receiving much encouragement to take to the stage.
'My father was a firefighter and he wanted me to be a policeman or a firefighter,' he said in 2019. 'I wanted to drive in Nascar. I thought that was my future because I love driving those cars, but life intervened. I accidentally got a part in a film and one thing led to another.'
Madsen also spent a while working under John Malkovich in the legendary Chicago theatre company Steppenwolf. He later fondly remembered the dog who nearly upstaged him in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. 'That f**king dog was the best acting teacher I ever had,' he said.
Following a move to Los Angeles, he landed small roles in contemporary TV series such as St Elsewhere, Miami Vice and Quantum Leap. Then came that subtle turn in Thelma & Louise. It wasn't a huge role, but it was an eye-catching one.
A year later, Reservoir Dogs worked miracles for most members of its impeccably chosen cast –Tim Roth, Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi – but, in what now looks like an eerily predictive omen, Madsen just missed out on the next step towards beckoning glory.
Tarantino was keen on having him play Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction, the role that ultimately revived John Travolta's career, but Madsen was already tied up with Kevin Costner's humdrum Wyatt Earp.
Tarantino, who has planned many more films than he has made, never got around to a much-mooted team up between Travolta and Madsen as the Vega brothers.
Madsen's manager Ron Smith said cardiac arrest was the apparent cause. Photograph: Anthony Harvey/PA Wire
The dark, jowly actor had his personal ups and downs in the years that followed. He was married three times and engaged in a financially ruinous split with his second wife in the mid-1990s.
'I had an entertainment lawyer when I should have had a divorce lawyer,' Madsen, who filed for bankruptcy in 2009, told the Independent.
In 2022, Hudson Madsen, his son by DeAnna Morgan, took his own life. Last year, he was arrested on a charge of misdemeanour domestic battery after what his representatives described as 'a disagreement between Michael and his wife'.
Yet through it all he never stopped working. Many of the obituaries written over the next few days will describe him as a man out of his time. There is truth in that.
'I like Robert Mitchum, Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, all those cats,' he once said. Makes sense.
Like 'those cats', he radiated an unfiltered ruggedness that was drifting out of fashion as the confusing 21st century twitched into being. Like them, he saw acting as a proper job that required manly labour.
Few would envy any biographer ploughing through his huge body of work. In recent decades, he appeared (as 'Richard Dawkins'?) in a Telugu-language mystery called Nishabdham, a Star Trek parody with Snoop Dogg called Unbelievable!!!!! and a Turkish horror film called Magi.
Yet, when asked in 2019 to select an underrated performance, he pointed to an independent Irish film from 2007.
Strength and Honour
'Strength and Honour – I was an Irish American prize fighter,' he remembered. 'It never got any distribution. It went straight to DVD.'
Mark Mahon's film, emerging at a time when Irish features were as rare as Irish space shuttles, indeed featured Madsen as a retired fighter who takes up the gloves again to raise funds for his son's life-saving operation. It did, at least, get a limited release in Ireland.
'It came out on DVD with Vinnie Jones on the cover of the f**king thing!' Madsen said. 'It's underrated and forgot about. It's pretty f**king sad because it's a good f**king movie that I was good in.'
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Irish Independent
5 hours ago
- Irish Independent
Obituary: Michael Madsen, actor who will forever be known for that cut-throat razor scene in ‘Reservoir Dogs'
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Irish Times
5 hours ago
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Best graphic novels of 2025 so far: ‘One of the most affecting reading experiences I've had for many years'
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But it's also a seductive treatise on reflection – a call, one might say, to inaction, from a slower, more contented past. It's one that may not have ever existed, of course, but we could do worse than reach for it regardless. Misery of Love by Yvan Alagbé, translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York Review of Books) is, occasionally, a tough read. This is true in several senses. The first being that most of the book is formed of disconnected memories playing out of order in the mind of Claire, a young woman attending her grandfather's funeral in Paris. The narrative is, thus, fragmentary. Through it several patterns emerge: ruminations on death and religion; a strained, abusive relationship with her father; and, perhaps most prominently, a passionate affair with an African man, who her family rejects on grounds of his race. 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Eventually, Misery of Love unfurls into a story about French colonialism, doomed romance and the long-lasting impacts of familial abuse, one so adroitly conveyed that its many interconnected climaxes converge to create one of the most affecting reading experiences I've had for many years.
Extra.ie
a day ago
- Extra.ie
Inside Michael Madsen's blended family life
Acting legend Michael Madsen has died aged 67. Michael, who was best known for menacing roles in Quentin Tarantino films such as Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill, was found unresponsive by authorities who were responding to a 911 call. He was pronounced dead at the scene, with his manager saying that he died of cardiac arrest. Actor Michael Madsen attends 'Reservoir Dogs' 25th Anniversary Screening during the 2017 Sundance Film Festival at Eccles Center Theatre. Pic: Getty Images Known for playing sadistic, menacing characters, Michael Madsen has over 300 acting credits to his name. He had his first notable acting role in WarGames, the 1983 thriller starring Matthew Broderick. However, he became best known for his role as Mr Blonde in Quentin Tarantino's feature-length debut, Reservoir Dogs — where he participated in the film's most infamous scene, torturing a police officer while Stuck In the Middle With You played in the background. From there, he collaborated with Tarantino on three more films where he had notable roles — playing Budd in Kill Bill Volumes 1 & 2, and as 'Grouch' Douglass in The Hateful Eight. His other credits include Donnie Brasco, Free Willy and Sin City. Michael's credits include Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill and the Hateful Eight. Pic: REX Michael's mother Elaine was an Emmy Award winning filmmaker and author, winning an award for her work on the documentary Better Than It Has to Be. His sister Virginia Madsen was also nominated for an Oscar in 2004, and is best known for her roles in Candyman and Sideways. He has a daughter, Jessica, with his former partner Jeannine Bisignano. In 1984, Michael married his first wife, Georganne LaPierre, before they divorced in 1988. From 1991 to 1995 he was married to Jeannine Bisignano, with the couple having two sons, Christian and Max, both of whom are actors — Christian best known for his work in Palo Alto and Divergent. In 1996, he married DeAnna Morgan while on a break from filming Donnie Brasco, with the couple having three children together — Luke, Kalvin and Hudson. Tragically, however, Hudson took his own life in 2022. Susan Sarandon and Michael Madsen star in the film 'Thelma And Louise', 1991. Pic: Getty Images He was also known for his charity work, winning an award for his work with the Shriner's Children's Hospital in 2002. In 2016, he hosted An Intimate Evening with Michael Madsen to benefit Children's Paediatric Cancer. Speaking during a handprint ceremony at the famous Chinese Theatre in LA back in 2020, Michael spoke about his first time in Hollywood in the 1980s — saying '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. 'I didn't know because I didn't know what I was going to do at that point with myself.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.' Michael is survived by his daughter Jessica, sons Christian, Max, Luke and Kalvin, and is predeceased by his son Hudson.
