Cult hero? Are you kidding? Kinski was a piece of work: surly, viciously misanthropic, a pathological womaniser crippled by self hate. Ice shards barbed his soul, chunks of metal nestled in his heart. Witness those reptilian turns in Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: The Wrath of God, stark, amoral movies constructed around Kinksi's nihilistic epicentre.
Born in 1926, Kinksi grew up in the grim Polish port town Gdansk (then part of Germany) and Berlin.
Drafted on the brink of the second World War, he served most of the conflict in a British POW camp, narrowly surviving a bout of tuberculosis. Perhaps the experience tainted him somehow. After the war, he limped home snarling and possessed of a cold burning fury.
Returning to Berlin in the late 1940s, Kinksi threw himself into acting with feral abandon, quickly blossoming into one of the city's most formidable stage figures. His cruel beauty and chilling presence were custom-made for cinema - he swiftly graduated to the silver screen, impressing in a string of despondent European dramas, most notably A Time to Love and a Time to Die and The Counterfeit Traitor. He crossed over on David Lean's grandiose Russian folly Dr Zhivago, an insouciant, marrow-curdling portrayal which set the tone for a career subsequently divided between tatty exploitica and stoic art house fare. A tempestuous 15-year partnership with hard living German auteur Werner Herzog copper-fastened Kinksi's cinematic immortality. Kinski and Herzog were almost impossible to work with. Thrown together, they wreaked chaos, their frequent on-set clashes often threatening to spill over into violence.
Yet the relationship yielded some of modern European film's most brilliantly off-key triumphs. Aguirre saw Kinski at his spine-tingling best as a Conquistador war lord and as an Irish evangelist in Herzog's Amazon epic Fitzcarraldo, he was never better. Behind the scenes, his confrontations with Herzog were growing more furious and after 1987's middling Cobra Verde, they fell out for good. Cheek by jowl with his arthouse output, Kinksi racked up a slew of forgettable monster flicks. His ghoulish over-acting enlivened Jesus Franco's sub-Hammer splatter-core romp Jack the Ripper and he made good work of the formulaic science- fiction workout Android.
Alas, there was also a great deal of unforgivable dross. He famously turned down Raiders of the Lost Ark in favour of lamentable Jaws rip-off Venom because the latter paid better.
With a string of failed marriages and a career locked in irrevocable tailspin, Kinksi suffered a fatal heart attack in 1991. He left behind a coruscating autobiography, riddled with slanders. It was sensationally withdrawn several months after publication. Kinski, you suspect, wouldn't have had it any other way.
Kinski: www.dantenet.com