I know, I know. But before I saw Blade Runner, I’d probably seen Ladyhawke half a dozen times. Most memorably at Ren faire, projected on the wall of a tent. I get that the drag show they do in the ale house after hours these days is probably (okay, definitely) more popular, and the dreadful karaoke on Friday nights. (Having extremely good relative pitch makes others’ karaoke difficult to take, and it doesn’t help to be able to hear it easily a hundred yards or more away through a tent wall.) But I will always have a happy fondness for the days when we’d watch Theatre of Blood or Ladyhawke or whatever that weird cartoon with the polar bears was.

For people who are not me, of course, he is Roy Batty. And I will grant you that his final speech in Blade Runner is a thing of beauty. His performance is pretty damn fine as well. He did not improvise the speech; he worked on it the night before. But the comparison between the script and what made it into the finished film is stark and a sign of why editing matters. The dialogue as written is heavier, wordier, denser. Less powerful. It doesn’t matter what C-beams are, where the Tannhäuser Gate is. What matters is the imagery, and “like tears in rain” is fine imagery not in the original. Nor is the grim resignation of “time to die.”

There is, of course, more to him than those two roles. A lot. He’s got 110 movie credits on IMDb—including seven in various stages of prerelease—and 44 TV credits. I’m not sure what percentage of it I’ve seen; not a huge one, I’m sure. I’ve never even heard of some of them, not helped by the fact that I don’t speak Dutch. But I never cease to be amazed at people who work as solidly as he does, even if it feels when you actually watch the movies as though he merely can’t quite say no.

I wonder if part of it is his eyes. He has impressively stark ice-blue eyes. He managed to be a bit inhuman as Roy Batty, a bit haunted as Navarre. I’m intrigued by what I’ve seen about the upcoming Emperor, a historical drama starring Adrien Brody as Charles V. And apparently C. Thomas Howell was actually afraid of him on the set of The Hitcher, because there is a hell of an intensity to him that comes across in person as well, at least when he’s acting. For all I know, he’s a peach of a guy.

According to Anne Rice, he is the basis for Lestat, but by the time they made the movie, he was too old for it. If I were a screenwriter, I’d be tempted to write a nice, meaty role for him where he didn’t play the villain; he’s good at playing villains, but I’d love to see him as a hero. Not exactly the “Liam Neeson fights for his daughter’s life” thing, but something of that power. Taking that same intensity and using it for good, kind of the way Navarre was but without the Matthew Broderick comic relief thing. Heck, get Michelle Pfeiffer back as his love interest, you know?

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