LOS ANGELES — Michael Madsen, the actor best known for his coolly menacing, steely-eyed, often sadistic characters in the films of Quentin Tarantino including “Reservoir Dogs” and “Kill Bill: Vol. 2,” has died.
Madsen was found unresponsive in his home in Malibu, California, on Thursday morning and pronounced dead, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Watch Commander Christopher Jauregui said. He is believed to have died of natural causes and authorities do not suspect any foul play was involved. Madsen’s manager Ron Smith said cardiac arrest was the apparent cause. He was 67.
Madsen’s career spanned more than 300 credits stretching back to the early 1980s, many in low-budget and independent films. He often played low-level thugs, gangsters and shady cops in small roles. Tarantino would use that identity, but make him a main character.
His torture of a captured police officer in Tarantino’s 1992 directorial debut “Reservoir Dogs,” in which Madsen’s black-suited bank robber Vic “Mr. Blonde” Vega severs the man’s ear while dancing to Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” was an early career-defining moment for both director and actor.
He would become a Tarantino regular. He had a small role as the cowboy-hatted desert dweller Budd, a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, in 2003’s “Kill Bill: Vol. 1,” then a starring role the following year in the sequel, in which he battles with Uma Thurman’s protagonist The Bride and buries her alive.
Madsen also appeared in Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” and “Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood.” He was an alternate choice to play the hit man role that revived John Travolta’s career in 1994’s “Pulp Fiction.” The character, Vincent Vega, is the brother of Madsen’s “Reservoir Dogs” robber in Tarantino’s cinematic universe.
Madsen was born in Chicago to a family of three children. His sister is Oscar-nominated “Sideways” actor Virginia Madsen.
He performed on stage with Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company alongside actors including John Malkovich.
During a handprint ceremony at the TCL Chinese Theatre in November 2020, Michael Madsen reflected on his first visit to Hollywood in the early 1980s.
“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. And I didn’t know because I didn’t know what I was going to do at that point with myself,” he said. “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.”
Growing up in Chicago as a firefighter’s son, Madsen told the Sun-Times in 1993 he “knew I wanted to do something with my life, but I didn’t know what. Finally I put two and two together when I saw a play, Steppenwolf’s `Of Mice and Men.’ “
After hanging out on the fringes of Steppenwolf, a “casting woman” sent him to New York and Italian director Sergio Leone, who had created the Clint Eastwood mystique in his man-with-no-name Westerns.
“He kept telling me he could see something in me,” said Madsen, “the same thing he saw in Eastwood. It was encouraging. But I was too young, I was 22. He did tell me, get out of Chicago. I went to L.A., worked at a gas station. Pretty soon I started playing bad guys on episodic TV. In the beginning, I thought it was fantastic that I was getting all this work.”
His first film role of any significance was in the 1983 hacker thriller “WarGames” with Matthew Broderick. The following year he played pro baseball player Bump Bailey alongside Robert Redford in “The Natural.”
He spent much of the rest of the 1980s doing one-off guest roles on television dramas including “Miami Vice” and “Quantum Leap.”
1991 would bring a career boost with roles in “The Doors,” where he played a buddy of Val Kilmer’s Jim Morrison, and “Thelma and Louise” where he played the boyfriend of Susan Sarandon’s Louise.
After a few years, he felt like he “was going nowhere,” he told the Sun-Times. Then came his star-making turn in “Reservoir Dogs,” which was done almost as a favor for co-star Harvey Keitel and director Quentin Tarantino. Suddenly Madsen was in demand.
In 1995, he played a black ops mercenary in the sci-fi thriller “Species” and in 1997 he was third billed after Al Pacino and Johnny Depp as a member of a crew of gangsters in “Donnie Brasco.”
He occasionally played against type. In the 1993 family orca adventure “Free Willy” he was the foster father to the orphan protagonist.
Madsen would return to smaller roles but worked constantly in the final two decades of his career.
“In the last 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 in a statement. “Michael was also preparing to release a new book called ‘Tears For My Father: Outlaw Thoughts and Poems’ currently being edited.”
They added that he “was one of Hollywood’s most iconic actors, who will be missed by many.”
Virginia Madsen posted a statement on Instagram on behalf of the family.
“I’ll miss our inside jokes, the sudden laughter, the sound of him. I’ll miss the boy he was before the legend. I miss my big brother,” Virginia Madsen wrote.