Michael Madsen, a sledgehammer of an actor who became one of Hollywood’s reigning bare-knuckled heavies thanks to indelible performances in Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” and “Kill Bill” series, as well as in the critically acclaimed mob film “Donnie Brasco,” died on Thursday at his home in Malibu, Calif. He was 67.
The cause was cardiac arrest, said his manager, Ron Smith.
Mr. Madsen never achieved true leading-man status like his soul mates Charles Bronson and James Gandolfini — but perhaps, measured by volume, he did. A tough guy’s tough guy, he seemed ubiquitous in his 1990s heyday, one of those guy-who-was-in-everything actors, like Don Cheadle and Luis Guzmán.
His Internet Movie Database entry cites 346 acting credits. By comparison, Mr. Bronson, a longtime marquee-topper known for star vehicles like the “Death Wish” series, had 164 when he died in 2003 at 81.
With a whiff of Mickey Rourke, a hint of Sylvester Stallone and a linebacker’s physique, Mr. Madsen had the air of a timeless Hollywood bad guy who seemed to have stepped out of a 1940s film noir.
This point was abundantly clear to the actor himself.
“Maybe I was just born in the wrong era, man,” he said in a 2004 interview with The Guardian. “I’m a bit of a throwback to the days of black-and-white movies. Those guys back then, they had a certain kind of directness about them. A lot of the screenplays, the plots were very simplistic — they gave rise to a type of antihero that maybe I suit better.”
If the role called for a sprinkle of sadism, Mr. Madsen was your man, as showcased in “Reservoir Dogs” (1992), Mr. Tarantino’s breakout thriller about a crew of slick-suited thieves bungling a diamond heist in the bloodiest possible fashion. He was part of an ensemble cast that also included Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn and Steve Buscemi.
Few could forget — or sleep after seeing — Mr. Madsen’s flinch-inducing performance in the film as the very brunette Mr. Blonde fiddling with a stereo knob, then strutting his way around a warehouse with a straight razor and a psychopath’s sang-froid to the sound of “Stuck in the Middle With You,” the hit 1973 song by Stealers Wheel, as he draws out the torture of a soon-to-be-earless kidnapped police officer.
As his career unfolded, Mr. Madsen remained in the Tarantino inner circle. He brougIn 2015, he had a “Reservoir Dogs” reunion with Mr. Roth in Mr. Tarantino’s sprawling western vengeance tale, “The Hateful Eight,” playing Joe Gage, a gruff cowboy with a sartorial flair. Mr. Madsen also had a cameo in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” the director’s 2019 movieland-meets-Manson tour de force.ht his thug gravitas to the director’s samurai-sword blood baths “Kill Bill: Volume 1” (2003) and “Kill Bill: Volume 2” (2004), as Budd, a.k.a. Sidewinder, the honky-tonk strip club bouncer and former assassin whom Uma Thurman’s own assassin character has vowed to kill.
