Michael Madsen, who has died of cardiac arrest in California at the age of 67, was involved in a defining cinematic image of the 1990s. His terpsichorean brutalisation, in 1992, of the terrified cop in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs was right up there with Leonardo DiCaprio bellowing “King of the World” in Titanic and Keanu Reeves evading hurtling bullets in The Matrix.
The scene announced an ironic brutality that would run right through pop culture in the last decade of the 20th century. Before and after slicing off the bloodied officer’s ear – at which point the camera coyly looks in another direction – Madsen does a horrendous soft-shoe shuffle to Stuck in the Middle with You by Stealers Wheel. It’s hard to think of anybody else with the right combination of mischief and menace to pull it off.
[ Michael Madsen, star of Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill and Donnie Brasco, dies aged 67Opens in new window ]
Tarantino had (and still has) a genius for making stars of hitherto mid-ranking actors. He later did that for Christoph Waltz. He bumped Samuel L Jackson up a great many rungs in Pulp Fiction.
Madsen had already impressed as Geena Davis’s hopeless boyfriend in Thelma & Louise, but Reservoir Dogs seemed to have located a new constellation in the heavens. Here was a charismatic heavy for the ages. A new George Raft. A new James Coburn. That wasn’t quite how it worked out.
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He toiled with Stakhanovite energy ever since – the Internet Movie Database lists an eye-watering 346 acting credits between 1982 and 2025 – but the great roles in important films kept eluding him.
“I should have at least got a meeting with Spielberg for Private Ryan,” he told the Guardian in 2004. “LA Confidential was written with me in mind, but Russell Crowe got the part. Go figure.”
If, any year this century, you strolled around the Cannes market – a veritable bazaar beneath the Palais des Festivals – his 2D presence proved unavoidable.
“You get these horrifying straight-to-video things for very little money,” he said. “Then you go to the Cannes Film Festival, and they got some poster of you, 40ft high, in the worst movie in the world.”
Tarantino again made good use of the actor in Kill Bill, The Hateful Eight and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but it feels as if the wider industry never properly knew what to do with him.
Madsen was born and raised in the blue-collar city of Chicago. There was creative energy elsewhere in the family. Elaine Madsen, his mother, won an Emmy for producing the documentary Better than It Has to Be in 1983.
Virginia Madsen, his sister, is a fine actor with credits on Candyman, The Rainmaker and – securing her an Oscar nomination in 2005 – Alexander Payne’s beloved comedy Sideways.
Yet Michael Madsen didn’t remember receiving much encouragement to take to the stage.
“My father was a firefighter and he wanted me to be a policeman or a firefighter,” he said in 2019. “I wanted to drive in Nascar. I thought that was my future because I love driving those cars, but life intervened. I accidentally got a part in a film and one thing led to another.”
When asked in 2019 to select an underrated performance, he pointed to an independent Irish film from 2007
Madsen also spent a while working under John Malkovich in the legendary Chicago theatre company Steppenwolf. He later fondly remembered the dog who nearly upstaged him in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. “That f**king dog was the best acting teacher I ever had,” he said.
Following a move to Los Angeles, he landed small roles in contemporary TV series such as St Elsewhere, Miami Vice and Quantum Leap. Then came that subtle turn in Thelma & Louise. It wasn’t a huge role, but it was an eye-catching one.
A year later, Reservoir Dogs worked miracles for most members of its impeccably chosen cast – Tim Roth, Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi – but, in what now looks like an eerily predictive omen, Madsen just missed out on the next step towards beckoning glory.
Tarantino was keen on having him play Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction, the role that ultimately revived John Travolta’s career, but Madsen was already tied up with Kevin Costner’s humdrum Wyatt Earp.
Tarantino, who has planned many more films than he has made, never got around to a much-mooted team-up between Travolta and Madsen as the Vega brothers.
The dark, jowly actor had his personal ups and downs in the years that followed. He was married three times and engaged in a financially ruinous split with his second wife in the mid-1990s.
“I had an entertainment lawyer when I should have had a divorce lawyer,” Madsen, who filed for bankruptcy in 2009, told the Independent.
In 2022, Hudson Madsen, his son by DeAnna Morgan, took his own life. Last year he was arrested on a charge of misdemeanour domestic battery after what his representatives described as “a disagreement between Michael and his wife”.
Yet through it all he never stopped working. Many of the obituaries written over the next few days will describe him as a man out of his time. There is truth in that.
“I like Robert Mitchum, Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, all those cats,” he once said. Makes sense.
Like “those cats”, he radiated an unfiltered ruggedness that was drifting out of fashion as the confusing 21st century twitched into being. Like them, he saw acting as a proper job that required manly labour.
Few would envy any biographer ploughing through his huge body of work. In recent decades, he appeared (as “Richard Dawkins”?) in a Telugu-language mystery called Nishabdham, a Star Trek parody with Snoop Dogg called Unbelievable!!!!! and a Turkish horror film called Magi.
Yet, when asked in 2019 to select an underrated performance, he pointed to an independent Irish film from 2007.
“Strength and Honour – I was an Irish-American prize fighter,” he remembered. “It never got any distribution. It went straight to DVD.”
Mark Mahon’s film, emerging at a time when Irish features were as rare as Irish space shuttles, indeed featured Madsen as a retired fighter who takes up the gloves again to raise funds for his son’s life-saving operation. It did, at least, get a limited release in Ireland.
“It came out on DVD with Vinnie Jones on the cover of the f**king thing!” Madsen said. “It’s underrated and forgot about. It’s pretty f**king sad because it’s a good f**king movie that I was good in.”
