HIDDEN DEPTHS

Rutger Hauer has starred in some 57 films, including Blade Runner, The Hitcher and Fatherland. Yet, with characteristically perverse parochialism, we Brits know him best for cavorting with a dolphin and spouting quasi- mystical nonsense in a beer commercial.

Not that he minds. Hauer has a refreshingly detached view of the whole star system. Relaxing in an armchair at a posh central London hotel, he looks in absurdly good shape for a man who has recently flown in from LA. His clothes - a designer rumpled, baggy dark blue jacket and pink button-down shirt - give off an undemonstrative air of serious money.

"The absurdity of those Guinness ads charmed me," he reflects. "The irony is that they sold beer without making any sense at all. The advertisers thought, `Let's create a beer that we call `pure genius' and get this Dutch guy with an American accent to tell the audience to lay off it.' You'd only have time to go `what?' and it would be all over. It had to be lighter than a feather. It's all to do with being playful."

Playfulness has distinguished many of Hauer's best roles; in his latest, as a seemingly dour Russian submarine commander in Hostile Waters, he enlivens proceedings by taking the mickey out of the on-board KGB officer.

"All film is illusion," Hauer explains. "We make you believe this is actually happening when it's not. I play a game in my films. It's not Brechtian, but there's always a moment in my performance where I wink at the audience as if to say `Are you still with me or not?'"

His keen sense of the absurd has not always endeared him to Hollywood moguls, many of whom think irony is an adjective describing something made of iron. After initial hits with Nighthawks, Blade Runner and The Hitcher when he went to America, Hauer's relationship with Hollywood has cooled somewhat. Perhaps they can't understand someone who prizes integrity above income.

"I try not to sell out," he muses. "The ultimate conflict in my life is summed up by Blade Runner - it's between true identity and fake. The copy can never be as good as the original. The powers that be in movies tend to stereotype everybody - that even goes for Harrison Ford or Brad Pitt. It doesn't matter who you are; all the executives want you to do is what you were successful in last. But it's hard to repeat anything. I don't want to do Nighthawks 9 or Die Hard 5. It's always the same battle between surprising people with something creative and doing something totally predictable."

Rather than sell his soul to the Mephistophelises that stalk Sunset Boulevarde, Hauer has increasingly opted to ply his trade in European arthouse films. It has paid off. His performance as a homeless man in Ermanno Olmi's The Legend of the Holy Drinker, for instance, earned him the Best Actor Award at the Seattle International Film Festival. "I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you if I were mainstream," he laughs. "I'd rather make movies in Europe. We're much richer in resources, more intelligent and less programmed."

His most recent attempt to evade the programmatic is as the Russian in Hostile Waters, an intelligent BBC thriller based on a real-life incident and penned by veteran conspiracy theorist Troy Kennedy Martin (Z Cars, The Sweeney, Edge of Darkness). Hauer plays Captain Britanov, a Russian nuclear submarine commander whose considerable mettle is put to the test when his vessel accidentally collides with an American sub on the eve of the Reykjavik peace summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. The potentially dated Cold War feel of the movie is leavened by an effectively claustrophobic atmosphere reminiscent of Das Boot and by superior performances from Hauer, Martin Sheen as the American submarine commander and Max Von Sydow as a tough Soviet admiral.

"It's a kind of `a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do' story," Hauer observes. "It sounds so tacky, but from the moment it takes you, it's a hell of a ride. We've succeeded in creating a story about passion in a submarine, believe it or not. What I liked about Hostile Waters when I first read it was that there was not a hair of nonsense in it. Everything is exact. It has mathematical structure, like a beehive. Every line has a function. The script is like an enormous chess-game, with no bullshit."

Hauer brought his familiar sense of detachment to the role. "It's only human to get nervous and excited in that situation because there's a lot at stake," he says. "But you can't lead a bunch of guys when you're panicking. Britanov is an incredibly cool guy. Part of leadership is knowing that you have to keep a couple of blocks of ice in your glass. My take on the man is that when you have to live in such a small space for such a long time, you'd better have space in your mind for other things. He has a life outside the submarine."

David M Thompson, the co-executive producer on the film, salutes Hauer's sheer presence. "He's a strong actor who holds that screen without giving a great deal away," he says. "He's a very delicate actor with subtle touches, but he's still someone who has the machismo to run a submarine. He has a great energy about him."

You might even go as far as to say that he's a sex symbol. "He's very striking," Thompson agrees. "He's not George Clooney, but he's an attractive personality who can elicit audience sympathy."

Hauer, a grandfather, divides his time between his boat in LA and a farm outside Amsterdam. It's a dual-personality lifestyle he's quite happy with. "I've been on the road since 1980," he avers. "I don't feel part of a lot of things because I'm not there. How can I stay solid when I'm flying around so much? I'm somewhere in between the two continents. Without being mystic about it, I speak American and have a European mind."

Hostile Waters is on BBC1 on 26 July at 9pm

EYE TEST

1950s: Born in Holland, the son of actor parents, Hauer left school early to join a theatre company, but only really felt at home filming. The first time he went in front of a camera, "It was like an old friend I'd never met before. I knew this was it."

1970s: Made three films in Germany and six in Holland. "I got lucky," he reckons. "I was part of the birth of the Dutch film industry. Paul Verhoeven (who went on to direct Total Recall and Basic Instinct in Hollywood) raised me."

1980s: After the success of Verhoeven's `Soldier of Orange' in Europe, he made the decision to try to make it in America. His first US film was `Nighthawks', opposite Syklvester Stallone. "He was flaky, I was fine," Hauer laughs. His big break was in `Blade Runner'. "That film has an enduring appeal - the battle between man and machines is an eternal thing," Hauer says. He also had leading roles in `The Hitcher' and `The Legend of the Holy Drinker'.

1990s: Hauer has starred in `Amelia', `Inside the Third Reich', `Escape from Sobibor', `Dark Zone', `Fatherland' and `Buffy the Vampire Slayer'. He is soon to appear in a film of Jack London's `Call of the Wild'. He hopes to make his directorial debut with `Raindogs', his own screenplay. "I've always felt I was a director," he says, "but I'm not going to sell out. If the deal is `We're gonna tighten your arse on the budget so much that you'll scream', I won't do it."