‘Reservoir Dogs' actor Michael Madsen died from heart failure, doctor says
Madsen was found unresponsive Thursday at his Malibu home. He was 67.
His doctor said heart failure will be listed as the cause of death, with heart disease and alcoholism named as contributing factors.
Deputies responded to the Los Angeles County home after a 911 call early Thursday. Madsen was pronounced dead at the residence.
No autopsy will be conducted because the cardiologist who was treating Madsen signed the death certificate. The case is considered closed by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, with no foul play indicated, and is listed as a death from natural causes.
Manager Ron Smith said last week that Madsen died from cardiac arrest.
The gravelly-voiced Madsen was known for portraying enigmatic tough guy characters, and amassed a long list of film credits during his career spanning four decades.
Madsen, the brother of Academy Award-nominated actor Virginia Madsen, brought complex characters to life in 'Kill Bill: Vol. 1,' 'Reservoir Dogs,' 'Thelma & Louise,' 'Donnie Brasco' and more.
Madsen, who also published several volumes of poetry, was born in Chicago, where he was part of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. His Hollywood career was launched with an appearance in the 1983 sci-fi techno thriller 'WarGames.'
Madsen, playing the role of cruel criminal 'Mr. Blonde,' was part of Quentin Tarantino's directorial debut in 1992's 'Reservoir Dogs.' The two would collaborate frequently in Hollywood, including 'Kill Bill: Vol. 1,' 'The Hateful Eight' and 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.'
Madsen's 'Reservoir Dogs' performance included a notoriously memorable scene in which Mr. Blonde, aka Victor 'Vic' Vega, tortured a man he was tasked with guarding as he danced to the song 'Stuck in the Middle With You.'
Hudson Madsen, one of his six children, died by suicide at age 26 in 2022. He was one of three sons Madsen shared with his wife, DeAnna Madsen. He also had children from a previous marriage.
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The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘It was a buddy movie – and then they kissed': Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi on My Beautiful Laundrette at 40
It is a sweltering summer afternoon and I'm blowing bubbles over the heads of Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi while they have their pictures taken in a sun-dappled corner of the latter's garden. Perched in front of them as they sit side by side – Kureishi, who has been tetraplegic since breaking his neck in a fall in 2022, is in a wheelchair – is a silver cake made to look like a washing machine, commissioned to mark the 40th anniversary of their witty, raunchy comedy-drama My Beautiful Laundrette. Some of the bubbles land on the cake's surface, causing everyone present to make a mental note to skip the icing, while others burst on the brim of Frears's hat or drift into Kureishi's eyes. It is not perhaps the most dignified look for an esteemed duo celebrating an enduring Oscar-nominated gem. Don't think they haven't noticed, either. As the bubbles pop around them, Kureishi upbraids the photographer for trampling on his garden – 'Mind my flowers!' – while Frears grumbles: 'I could be watching the cricket.' Get them on to the subject of the film, though, and an aura of pride soon prevails. No wonder. My Beautiful Laundrette, which revolves around a run-down dive transformed into 'a jewel in the jacksie of south London' by an Anglo-Pakistani entrepreneur and his lover, did many things: it distilled and critiqued an entire political movement (Thatcherism), portrayed gay desire in unfashionably relaxed terms, and audaciously blended social realism with fable-like magic and cinematic grandeur. It launched a writer (Kureishi), a production company (Working Title, later the home of Richard Curtis), a prestigious composer (Hans Zimmer) and, most strikingly, one of the greatest of all actors: Daniel Day-Lewis, who plays Johnny, the ex-National Front thug teaming up (and copping off) with his former schoolmate Omar (Gordon Warnecke). Or 'Omo' as Johnny teasingly calls him even as he licks his neck in public or they douse one another in champagne. It is well known that Gary Oldman and Tim Roth were also in the running to play Johnny. Frears adds an unlikelier name to the mix. 'Kenneth Branagh came to see me,' says the 84-year-old film-maker. 'Half a second and you knew: 'Well, he's not right.' But good for him for wanting to do it.' The leading candidate seemed clear in Frears's mind, and not only because Day-Lewis threatened to break his legs if he didn't cast him. 'All the girls said: 'You want Dan.' He was top of the crumpet list at the Royal Court.' On screen, he is magnetically minimalist. 'Dan loved Clint Eastwood,' Kureishi points out. 'He loved how still Clint was. You can see the influence: Dan doesn't move very much.' Frears detected the echo of an even older star. 'I remember him standing by the lamppost under the bridge in the scene where he and Omar meet again, and I thought: 'Ah, I see. You want to play it like Marlene Dietrich.'' Kureishi, now 70, was already established as a young playwright before he wrote the film. Not that his father was impressed. 'He hadn't come to this country to see his son doing little plays above pubs,' he says in between sips of kefir. 'He thought I'd never make a living as a writer, so I really wanted to get moving.' Frears once likened reading My Beautiful Laundrette to 'finding a new continent'. In writing it, Kureishi combined scraps of autobiography with cinematic tropes. 'My dad had got me involved with a family friend called Uncle Adi, who ran garages and owned properties. He was kind of a grifter. He took me around these launderettes he owned in the hope that I would run them for him. They were awful fucking places; people were shooting up in there. So I thought I'd write about a bloke running a launderette. Then I thought: 'Well, he needs a friend.' It could be a buddy movie, like The Sting. But I couldn't get a hold on it. Then, as I was writing, they kissed – and suddenly everything seemed more purposeful. Now it was a love story as well as a story about a bloke going into business.' The tension between Omar and Johnny, his formerly racist pal-turned-lover, was drawn from Kureishi's own experience of growing up in south London. 'Lots of my friends had become skinheads. My best friend turned up at my house one day with cropped hair, boots, Ben Sherman shirt, all the gear. My dad nearly had a heart attack. He'd spent a lot of time trying not to be beaten up by skinheads. It was terrifying to be a Pakistani in south London in the 1970s.' Omar's uncle, exuberantly played by Saeed Jaffrey, was similarly lifted from life. 'He was based on a friend of my father's: a good-time boy who had a white mistress.' That lover was played in the film by Shirley Anne Field, star of the kitchen-sink classic Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. 'She was a woman of such grace and elegance,' sighs Kureishi. 'Dan and I would interrogate her all the time: 'Who's the most famous person you've slept with?' She'd slept with President Kennedy. And George Harrison!' He still sounds amazed. When Frears came on board, he made some invaluable suggestions. 'Stephen told me: 'Make it dirty,'' says Kureishi. 'That's a great note. Writing about race had been quite uptight and po-faced. You saw Pakistanis or Indians as a victimised group. And here you had these entrepreneurial, quite violent Godfather-like figures. He also kept telling me to make it like a western.' Frears looks surprised: 'Did I?' Kureishi replies: 'Yeah. I never knew what that meant.' There are visual touches that suggest the genre: a Butch Cassidy-esque bicycle ride, a Searchers-style final camera set-up peering through a doorway, not to mention a magnificent crane shot that hoists us from the back of the launderette and over its roof. 'I think what Stephen meant is that it's about two gangs getting ready to fight. The Pakistani group and the white thugs. There's something coming down the line.' His other note to Kureishi was that the film should have a happy ending. Why? 'We'd asked people to invest so much in these characters,' says Frears. 'And a sad ending is quite easy in an odd sort of way. This one's only happy in the last 10 seconds.' Kureishi agrees: 'Yeah. But you leave the cinema in a cheerful mood.' It was a happy ending for the film-makers, too. Frears recalls one reviewer observing that while Kureishi might not be able to spell, he could certainly write. That reminds me: the story goes that Kureishi deliberately misspelt the title as an indictment of his own education. But he scotches that rumour. 'I'm from Bromley,' he says. 'I thought that was how you spelled it.' If the film was a skyrocket for its writer, it heralded a new chapter for Frears. He had recently made his second film for cinema – the stylish, ruminative thriller The Hit starring Roth, John Hurt and Terence Stamp – 13 years after his debut, Gumshoe. Ironically, My Beautiful Laundrette, which was shot on 16mm for just £600,000, was only intended to be screened on Channel 4. But a rapturous premiere at the Edinburgh film festival, accompanied by acclaim from critics including the Guardian's Derek Malcolm, made a cinema release the only possible launchpad. Kureishi recalls that trip with fondness. 'I was in Edinburgh with Tim Bevan [of Working Title] and Dan, and we all slept in the same room. I made sure I got the bed, and the others were on the floor. Dan didn't even have a suitcase, just a toothbrush. Every night, he'd wash his underwear and his socks in the sink and put them on again the next day.' Blown up to 35mm, this low-budget TV film became a magnet for rave reviews here and in the US (the New Yorker's Pauline Kael called it 'startlingly fresh'), bagged Kureishi an Oscar nomination and helped reinvigorate Frears's movie career, paving the way for later hits including Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters and The Queen. Neither of them has seen it recently. 'I don't watch my old films,' Frears says with a grimace. 'You either sit there thinking: 'I should have done that better.' Or else: 'That's rather good. Why can't I do that any more?'' I assure them that the picture looks better than ever, whether it's the visual panache of Oliver Stapleton's cinematography or the enchanting subtlety of Warnecke's performance, which was rather overshadowed by Day-Lewis at the time but can now be seen to chart delicately Omar's gradual blossoming. It goes without saying that My Beautiful Laundrette was ahead of its time, especially in its blase approach to queerness. When the picture was released in the UK at the end of 1985, homophobia was becoming more virulent and widespread in the media as cases of Aids escalated. The Conservative government's section 28 legislation, outlawing the 'promotion' of homosexuality by local authorities, was just over two years away. The timing of the film's re-emergence today is not lost on its author. 'It's so hard to be gay now,' says Kureishi. 'There's all this hostility toward LGBT people, so it feels important that the film is out there again in this heavily politicised world where being gay or trans is constantly objectified. It's a horrible time.' Interviewed in 1986 by Film Comment magazine, however, Kureishi dismissed the idea of it as a 'gay film', and derided the whole concept of categories. 'There's no such thing as a gay or black sensibility,' he said then. How does he feel today? 'I still don't want to be put in a category. I didn't like it when people called me a 'writer of colour' because I'm more than that.' The film, too, is multilayered. 'It's about class, Thatcherism, the Britain that was emerging from the new entrepreneurial culture. I didn't want it to be restricted by race or sexuality, and that hasn't changed.' I wonder if it rankles, then, that My Beautiful Laundrette was voted the seventh best LGBTQ+ film of all time in a 2016 BFI poll. And it does – though not for the reason I had anticipated. 'What was above it?' demands Frears in a huff. 'Why didn't it win?' Still, both men are thrilled that the film was embraced by queer audiences. 'If Stephen and I have done anything to make more people gay, we'd be rather proud of that.' My Beautiful Laundrette is in cinemas from 1 August. Frears, Kureishi and Warnecke will take part in a Q&A following a screening on 25 July at the Cinema Rediscovered festival in Bristol
Scottish Sun
12 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
The 1% Club knocks out a whopping 14 players with a simple letter question – but could you get it under pressure?
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) THIS is the simple letter question on The 1% Club which knocked out a whopping 14 players. Lee Mack has fronted the game show on ITV since 2022 which has been a smash hit amongst fans. Sign up for the Entertainment newsletter Sign up 6 Lee Mack announced that over a dozen contestants were eliminated from The 1% Club in one go Credit: ITV 6 The presenter tested the players on their knowledge of the alphabet Credit: ITV 6 Contestants had to answer the letter based question in 30 seconds Credit: ITV Instead of testing players on their general knowledge, The 1% Club takes a whole different approach. 100 players sit in the studio audience as they are tested on their logic, reasoning skills and common sense. They have to answer riddles that a certain percentage of the public could get right with a 30 second time limit. For each player that gets eliminated, £1,000 gets added to the potentially huge jackpot prize. This continues until the players who get to the final round try to join the prestigious club by answering the last question that only one per cent of the public could answer correctly. But on an episode of the show available on ITVX, many players were eliminated quite early in the game by the 50% question. Lee initially: "'A' is the first capital letter in the alphabet that looks the same in the mirror." The question continued: "What is the second?" 14 players were eliminated as they just couldn't get the answer correct. The answer was the letter 'H' as £14,000 was added to the total, taking the jackpot prize to a whopping £49,000. The 1% Club players struggle on very tough letters question - can you outsmart them? This comes after it was revealed that The 1% Club is set to undergo a huge format shake-up with its next run of episodes. Instead of its usual Saturday night slot, execs at the commercial network plan to air episodes every weeknight back-to-back. It means that fans will be able to tune into an edition of the show every night for five nights. The show will also implement a new roll-over feature as the prize money rolls over from each episode. This means, there is the chance to win a staggering £500,000 on the 1% question on the final show of the week. 6 The answer was of course the letter 'H' 6 14 players either could not guess the right letter or pressed the pass on the question Credit: ITV 6 £14,000 was added to the huge jackpot prize Credit: ITV The 1% Club continues on ITV1 and is available to watch on ITVX.
The Guardian
18 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘This is not AI': why oiled-up abs are the least radical thing about Sacha Baron Cohen's reinvention
It is a rite of passage for almost every comic actor working today. You spend years – sometimes even decades – curating a reputation as a happy go lucky, physically anonymous everyman. Then Marvel comes knocking, and you realise that you might have to share a scene with Chris Hemsworth, and next to him you're going to look like a weedy twig-worm hybrid. The next thing you know, you're all over the internet, greased up and flexing. Which is a very long way of saying: Borat's got abs now. Sacha Baron Cohen is this month's Men's Fitness magazine cover model. His pecs are popping. His biceps are bulging. His forearms look like a sack of live snakes. His pants are, conservatively, two and half inches lower than they really should be. His entire torso looks like it's been rolled around in margarine. He is, to use his own words, 'hard launching my mid-life crisis'. And this is all because of Marvel. Sacha Baron Cohen stars in the Disney+ TV show Ironheart as Mephisto. Which might be news to a lot of you, since Ironheart was released right at the moment that superhero fatigue hit such terminal velocity that president of Marvel Studios Kevin Feige essentially chose to promote the Fantastic Four movie by promising everyone that he wasn't going to make as many TV shows any more. But, really, that's beside the point. Because, of all the shredded topless comic actor torso reveals, the only one to go on to any substantial screen time was Chris Pratt. It has now been 12 years since he took his top off for Instagram to show his transformation from 'the schlubby one from Parks and Recreation' to 'man with abdominal muscles', and he has since been in six MCU films, a Christmas special and several other projects that relied on him looking ripped. Contrast that with Kumail Nanjiani, who went from a round-faced, Oscar-nominated writer in 2017 to looking like a vacuum-sealed walnut bag in 2019. And this because he had been cast in The Eternals, in which he effectively had a bit part as one of about 300 new superheroes. Aside from a voice acting gig in one episode of What If…?, that has been the sum total of his MCU output. Which is still a ton compared to Sacha Baron Cohen, whose Mephisto appeared fully clothed in just one episode of a television show that has left no cultural footprint whatsoever. The point is that, while a Marvel gig might ostensibly be the impetus to start pumping iron, it isn't necessarily the end goal. For all anyone knows, we may never see Mephisto again. But the image of Cohen clutching a pair of dumbbells while being covered in more goose fat than a cross-channel swimmer will live for ever. Especially since his earlier career relied upon him showing off as much of his body as he could. Go back and look at photos of him in a mankini as Borat, and you'll see what a change this is. That said, despite being leaner and better defined now, those pictures demonstrate that the most effective element in his transformation may well have been a comprehensive chest wax. Still, let's allow him this moment. If nothing else, Cohen is being neatly self-deprecating about how he looks on Instagram, quipping: 'Some celebs use Ozempic and some use private chefs, others use personal trainers. I did all three,' and 'This is not AI. I really am egotistical enough to do this.' And if it means that he's moving away from comedy – there's no way that Borat can ever wear another mankini unless he's going to aggressively rebrand himself as a thirsty divorcee – then so be it. Between Ironheart and last year's Disclosure, it seems like that's where he was headed anyway. Besides, this reveal puts Sacha Baron Cohen one step closer to the next chapter in the MCU playbook: complaining about how horrible it is to look like this. Chris Pratt did it, claiming that he had to drink so much water that his life became a 'nightmare'. Kumail Nanjiani did it, making a colossal show of getting to eat some cake like a normal person. And so it will inevitably be with Sacha Baron Cohen. That is, unless Mephisto becomes a central part of the MCU in the future. If that's the case, the brand sponsorship with Veet must be just around the corner.
