Rutger Hauer
Son of busy drama teachers, he was raised by private nannies and relatives until he ran out in his teenage years to the sea. After a year he returned and worked various odd jobs while finishing school by night, then he joined an acting school at college.
He seems to have finished it and joined an experimental acting group for a couple of years until Paul Verhoeven, fresh from a series of documentaries and one even winning an award for a military documentary, found him and offered a job for his new ventures at Dutch television in a series so-called Floris, man was 25 at this point.
The series was a success and established both in firm ground, later they collaborated in perhaps a couple of Netherlands' most famous projects internationally: 1973's Turks Fruit, 1975's Keetje Tippel and 1977's Soldaat van Oranje.
After the international release of the latter, along with Verhoeven fighting with the national media and producers (concluding with his famous revenge in form of a movie years later) Hauer jumped the pond and found himself in international projects like 1981's Nighthawk and 1982's Blade Runner.
The man purportedly had a habit of picking roles depending solely if he liked the character and if he could potentiate its traits, giving place to memorable roles in big movies or awkwardly strong performances in direct2video projects. Movies like 1986's The Hitcher, 1989's Blind Fury and 1992's Split Second just like 1988's La Leggenda del Santo Bevitore are example of this.
Man was also informally known as one of the few actors who insisted on portraying german SS units as any other kind of soldier, and if anything more refined if we are to go by his SS roles which were more than a couple; this grounded obvious industry controversy and the mythical "punitive" projects mentioned in contemporary urban legends regarding people who are against vilification. Truth or not this fella worked well in the vast majority of his movies, which made him the most famous dutch actor around.
