Reservoir Dogs star Michael Madsen dies aged 67

Telegraph

17 hours ago

Michael Madsen, the US actor known for his roles in Quentin Tarantino 's Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill, has died at the age of 67.
Madsen was found unresponsive in his home in Malibu, California, on Thursday morning after dying from natural causes, according to authorities.
Ron Smith, one of his managers, said Madsen had died of a cardiac arrest.
'In the past two years, Michael Madsen has been doing some incredible work with independent film including upcoming feature films Resurrection Road, Concessions and Cookbook for Southern Housewives and was really looking forward to this next chapter in his life,' his managers Smith and Susan Ferris, and publicist Liz Rodriguez, said.
They added that he 'was one of Hollywood's most iconic actors, who will be missed by many'.
Madsen was married three times and had seven children. His sister is the Oscar-nominated actor Virginia Madsen.
Madsen was a prolific actor featuring in more than 300 films stretching back to the early 1980s.
Born in Chicago in 1957, he got his start working at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre, which led to small early roles in 1980s films such as WarGames and The Natural.
His global breakthrough came with 1992's Reservoir Dogs, in which he played the sadistic, ear-cutting Mr Blonde, who tortures a captured policeman.
Mr Blonde was one of the 400 nominees for the American Film Institute's list of the all-time greatest movie villains.
Madsen would go on to win acclaim for his wise-cracking tough guy roles and became a Tarantino regular, appearing in the Kill Bill films and the director's later works The Hateful Eight (2015) and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).
He was originally tipped to play John Travolta's role in Tarantino's 1994 cult classic Pulp Fiction, but dropped out to appear in Kevin Costner's Wyatt Earp instead – a choice he later said he came to regret.
Other notable roles included Thelma and Louise (1991), Free Willy (1993), Die Another Day (2002) and Sin City (2005).
Speaking to The Guardian in 2004, Madsen complained of the 'patchiness' of his career, which he attributed to having come too late for the parts he wanted to play.
'Maybe I was just born in the wrong era,' he said. '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 anti-hero that maybe I suit better.'
In 2012, Madsen appeared in Celebrity Big Brother and in 2013 launched his own brand American Bad Ass chilli sauce.