Dieter Laser, the veteran German actor perhaps best known for orchestrating The Human Centipede’s grotesque, meme-spawning raison d’etre, has died. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the actor’s wife told media on Friday that her husband died in Berlin on February 29, though a cause of death is unknown. He was 78.
Born in Kiel, Germany in 1942, Laser embarked upon a career in theater at the age of 16 as a way of wriggling out of the fundamentalist Christian household in which he was raised. Per THR, he joked that becoming an actor meant making a “pact with the devil” and that he would one day pay for it “in hell.”
But he made quite the splash in the theater world, working with acclaimed German director Peter Stein at the lauded Berliner Schaubühne. With Stein, Laser starred in a successful run of Henrik Ibsen’s epic Peer Gynt alongside Downfall’s Bruno Ganz that would be filmed for German TV. He’d go on to appear in a number of German films and TV series, and, due to his his tight crop of dark hair and severe features, often found himself playing the villain. He did, however, win a German Film Award in 1975 for his leading turn in Ulf Miehe’s John Glückstadt) and a subsequent nomination for a supporting role in The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum.
As our review of The Human Centipede makes clear, Laser’s imposing presence could elevate even the most tasteless projects. Our review of the film says that, without Laser’s “mesmerizing” performance as a mad scientist who surgically stitches some tourists together, anus to mouth, the movie “may not have advanced further than the ligament-slicing stage of its cult development.”