Rutger Hauer obituary
The source of much of the plangent poetry in Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi drama Blade Runner was the electrifying and ruminative performance by the Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, who has died aged 75 after a short illness. Hauer played Roy Batty, a replicant in a futuristic society who revolts against his foreshortened existence by going rogue and demanding a longer lifespan; when he discovers that this request is impossible to grant, he crushes his creator's head in his hands.
Despite such extreme moments, Roy ended the film not as a villain but as a sympathetic creature tormented by his own mortality. Rather than killing his pursuer, played by Harrison Ford, Roy saves his life and then makes him an audience for a brief reminiscence - "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe" - before surrendering stoically to his own inevitable demise: "Time to die."
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