Love, for Kinski, was generally a torrid, ill-fated, short-lived and violent affair:

"Anuschka and I fly to Munich and rent a villa in Nymphenburg. Every morning I ride the trolley to rehearsals. At night, we fuck and have fist-fights. Anuschka slices her wrists with a razor in the middle of the street. I bandage her hands with the handkerchief and take her home, where we fuck and fight again."

Kinski dragged a beautiful girl from behind the counter of the glove shop where she worked. "Tell your mother you're with your future husband," he told her to say, that evening.

They were married; a short time later, Nastassja was born, named for the love interest in Dostoyevsky's "Idiot." Unable to be faithful to his innocent, devoted wife, whom he calls "Biggi," for even short stretches of time, Kinski abandoned her and Nastassja, preferring to indulge in a series of short, intense affairs and one-night stands in park bushes. Nastassja felt this abandonment deeply. (A profoundly beautiful, haunted woman, she has sought affairs with older men her entire life: She lived with Roman Polanski at 17 while filming "Tess." She married her manager, 17 years her senior; later, she married Quincy Jones.)

In 1971, Kinski did his most hubris-soaked stage tour: Jesus, playing to huge rock concert arenas in Germany. This was a free-form interpretation of Jesus, with Kinski jabbering into a microphone at top volume, wearing a floral shirt and tight, cock-hugging pants. The audience had come mainly to witness Kinski exploding into violent fits of rage; people would bait him and heckle him from the audience, and Kinski would turn purple with fury, storm offstage, storm back onstage, scream at the audience to fuck off, hurl mike stands, challenge hecklers to fistfights.

"I've come to tell the most exciting story in the history of mankind: the life of Jesus Christ. I'm not talking about the Jesus in those horrible gaudy pictures ... with the jaundice-yellow skin -- whom a crazy society has turned into the biggest whore of all time ... I don't mean the Jesus whose moldy kiss frightens little girls out of horny dreams before their First Communion and makes them die of shame and disgust when they foam in the latrines..."

Foam in the latrines?

"I'm talking about the adventurer, the freest, most fearless, most modern of all men, the one who preferred being massacred to rotting with the others."

Audience members would scream at Kinski that he wasn't Christlike at all, because Christ wasn't violent, Christ wouldn't tell people to shut up...

"Yeah, I've got violence in me, but no negative violence..."

No negative violence?

"My violence is the violence of the free man who refuses to knuckle under. Creation is violent."

In any case, creation was violent for Kinski and anyone who tried to create alongside him. When he began shooting the first film of his legendary collaboration with Werner Herzog, "Aguirre: The Wrath of God," Kinski had just cut short this Jesus tour, welshing on several theatrical contracts. He arrived in the Peruvian jungle, in Herzog's words, "as a derided, misunderstood Jesus ... it was difficult to talk to him because he would answer like Jesus."

Herzog has plenty of extra footage of Kinski being wildly abusive to everyone on the set. Kinski is said to have abused the Indian extras, hitting them in their helmets with his sword and shooting bullets into their hut.

While Herzog paints an unflattering picture of Kinski as a screeching, tyrannical coward, he always paid some level of lip service to his star's phenomenal talent:

"People like Brando are just kindergarten compared to Kinski. He is totally mad and unpredictable. You can see something raging in this man. We liked each other, we hated each other and we respected each other, even though we hatched serious plots to murder each other."

Kinski, at least in his autobiography, did not seem to ever appreciate Herzog, at all:

"[Herzog] just keeps talking and talking and talking ... His speech is clumsy, with a toadlike indolence, long-winded, pedantic, choppy. The words tumble from his mouth in sentence fragments, which he holds back as much as possible, as if they were earning interest. It takes forever and a day for him to push out a clump of hardened brain-snot. Then he writhes in painful ecstasy, as if he had sugar on his rotten teeth ... Even if his throat were cut and his head were chopped off, speech balloons would still dangle from his mouth like gases emitted by internal decay..."

Recent Stories